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With apartment buildings representing a rapidly growing share of the residential market in South Korea, the effect of construction defects throughout the life cycle of construction projects, and particularly during the occupancy stage, has emerged as a significant social issue that may ultimately lead to an increase in defect disputes between new occupants and general contractors. An important step toward mitigating the likelihood of these defect disputes is to identify and address the factors that give rise to occupant dissatisfaction during the defect repair process. However, a reliable method by which to identify these factors has yet to be developed. In this respect, the main objective of the research presented in this paper is to develop a method for identifying occupant dissatisfaction factors in the construction defect repair stage. The developed method comprises the following procedures: (i) text pre-processing, which involves data cleaning, normalization, tokenization, morphological analysis, and removal of stopwords; (ii) term frequency–inverse document frequency for keyword extraction; and (iii) semantic network analysis to recognize relationships between words. The method was implemented using a dataset of 12,874 comments in Korean text format obtained from apartment building occupants. Based on the processing and analysis of this dataset, the occupant dissatisfaction factors were found to be: (i) inaccurate and inadequate repair work (represented by such keywords as "Repair", "Visit", and "Accuracy"); (ii) failure to keep promises (e.g., "Fulfillment", "Promise", and "Change"); and (iii) unprofessional conduct on the part of representatives in the repair service center (e.g., "Response", "Attitude", and "Receipt"). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of the study presented in this paper is to determine the characteristics of the scaffolding supply chain in a liquefied natural gas (LNG) infrastructure project. This research is significant as the outsourcing of scaffolding is integral to its use and productivity toward LNG infrastructure project completion. As such, this paper presents the research undertaken on the subcontracting of scaffold manufacturing, supplying and delivering. It focuses upon the organisations, management and control in scaffolding subcontracting. A comparative analysis of three organisations was carried out to reveal issues with current practice in manufacturing, supplying and delivering scaffold products for assembly onsite. Their management and control approaches are also compared and contrasted. It is found that, while the divided contract approach may help save costs, enhance market exposure and is ideal when choice of subcontractor is limited, its risks can impact upon the entire project and be difficult for the contractor to control. The limited background in scaffolding studies and importance of subcontracting within LNG infrastructure projects has made this research timely. This paper identifies issues in relation to quality assurance, warranties and rework, which have the potential to mitigate any cost benefits obtained from subcontracting practices within this supply chain. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Construction projects require the generation and communication of an ever-larger amount of information. Unfortunately, present project organisations do not foster proactive approaches to preventing costly production waste derived from communication problems. To address this, the effective exchange of information needs to be performed across all different parties, as the construction project commonly includes concurrent progresses along its supply chain. This article proposes a new concept that integrates feed-forward control with the principle of network science. Referred to as supply-chain information network, it aims to comprehend the correlations within a sequenced supply chain network, in order to identify the critical communication links supporting a preventive control. Its effectiveness was verified by applying the model to an actual case: the rebar supply chain from a multi-story building in Sydney, NSW, Australia. The analysis recognised four problematical players in the supply chain: (1) rebar factory linemen, (2) radio crew, (3) senior steel fixers and (4) steel fixers, based on four centrality measurements. Consequently, the experimental data confirm the hypothesis that proactive management of the supply chain will produce drastic improvements, achieving up to 23.3% reduction in waste time during placement. The relevance of this research lies in the operational introduction of network science to the construction supply chain, and its proactive culture resulted in significant improvements of process performance. In addition, the developed communication backbone suggests an actualised test bed of concurrent information exchanges that tried to escape the spatiotemporal limitation in a chained attribute in the construction industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BIM staff plays the important role of providing required information from digital models to project participants. A dilemma is determining the appropriate capacity of BIM staff without sacrificing efficiency in terms of human resource costs. Despite the importance of BIM staffing, its effects on the productivity and performance of construction projects have rarely been investigated. This study presents a framework for quantifying the impact of BIM staffing. First, this study proposes a method to evaluate the activities of BIM staff by introducing a time-dependent queueing model. Second, the proposed framework is validated with data from three real-world projects in which BIM was applied. The effects of BIM staffing on the waiting time of project participants are quantitatively analyzed using time and cost indicators. The results show that decisions about optimal BIM staffing can be made by considering the waiting costs of project participants. • A method to evaluate the activities of BIM staff by introducing a time-dependent queueing model was proposed. • The proposed framework is validated with data from three real-world projects in which BIM was applied. • The effects of BIM staffing are quantitatively analyzed using time and cost indicators • Optimal BIM staffing can be judged using the waiting costs of project participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]