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The decision-making process in the field of health-care facility management is multifaceted and encompasses many different areas, including maintenance, performance, risk, operations, and development. Information and communications technologies are perceived as the interface that integrates these topics. The main objective of this research is to develop a decision-support system based on core parameters affecting the performance of health-care facilities. This paper presents the preliminary development of a quantitative integrated health-care facility management model, subdivided into the following three interfaces: input, reasoning evaluator and predictor, and output. The model proposes the following five modules: maintenance, performance and risk, energy and operations, business management, and development. It offers projection of maintenance costs, performance, and risk of built facilities in the health-care sector. The model hypotheses are that age, occupancy, and environment affect the maintenance of the facility. These factors are quantitatively developed and analyzed for performance-based maintenance planning, employing an occupancy coefficient and a projection of performance indicator. Simulations of the facility coefficient for different combinations of occupancy and environment reveal that the occupancy level is a major factor that causes an augmentation of more than 18% in the allocation of resources for maintenance compared with standard occupancy. Prediction of the performance score of a building is carded out using a nonlinear pattern for the structural components and linear patterns for the rest of the components. DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)0887-3801 (2007)21:5(363) CE Database subject headings: Health care facilities; Computer aided operations; Construction management.

Front-end planning (FEP) may be a key element in project success because it helps project participants more efficiently mitigate risk and define project objectives in the preplanning phase. However, very little is known about the effect of FEP for industrial project performance under different project delivery systems. To this end, this study investigated the impact of FEP on project performance by focusing on two widely used fast-track delivery methods: design-build (DB) and construction manager at risk (CMR), compared to the benchmarking conventional design-bid-build (DBB). The Spearman’s correlation analysis and Kruskal-Wallis test were performed on a real-world dataset, obtained from the Construction Industry Institute (CII), which comprised 438 industrial projects built between 1990 and 2010 in the US. The correlation analysis results revealed that better FEP resource allocation could help more design packages be completed efficiently and accurately to accelerate the fast-track process. The pair-wise comparison analysis results confirmed that there is no significant evidence to examine particular difference of schedule performance between CMR and DB. On the other hand, the results highlighted that project cost performance under DB were better than CMR. The results and findings of this study will help decision-makers choose appropriate project delivery methods for given project priorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Graduate admission committees in some construction management graduate educational programs in the United States may sometimes require students to take and submit their GRE scores as part of the admission requirements. This is because they tend to believe that the GRE scores could predict the academic performance and success of students in graduate school. This study assessed the predictive ability of admission GRE scores on cumulative GPA scores at graduation of construction management graduate students. The hypothesis was that students who scored high in GRE at the time of admission would attain higher cumulative GPAs at graduation. The independent variables were GRE verbal score, GRE quantitative score, and total GRE score while the dependent variable was the GPA score. SPSS v21 and SAS v9.3 statistical analysis tools facilitated the analysis of the data sourced from three construction management graduate programs in the United States. The results showed weak predictive indices where GRE quantitative score was the better predictor of graduation GPA. Thus, the hypothesis of higher GPAs being associated with higher GRE scores was weakly supported. It was recommended that construction management graduate programs should re-evaluate requiring GRE scores as part of their admission criteria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]