1,721,101 research outputs found
Risk and Resilience:How Construction Policy support disaster reduction
No full textDilanthi Amaratunga outlines how construction policy will support the UN’s Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reductio
Advances in Construction and Project Management
Full text linkThe construction industry makes a significant contribution to the global economy. Effective management of construction projects is essential to ensuring timely completion that meets quality standards within a project’s prescribed scope and budget. Furthermore, assuring sustainability is crucial to reducing the impact of construction on the environment. The construction industry is also affected by globalization and increasing susceptibility to disasters highlighting the need for health and safety and resilience in the industry, especially after global pandemics and natural disasters. Digitalization and industrialization pave the way to the solution or mitigation of numerous issues in the construction industry by transforming business operations, improving productivity and safety, ensuring quality and compliance to standards, increasing sustainability, among other measures. It is imperative for project managers and other construction stakeholders to be digitally oriented. This reprint comprises of a collection of cutting-edge research articles in construction and project management that explores advances in digital, sustainable, and industrialized construction solutions for prevalent issues in construction and project management and investigates the needs of health and safety and resilience in the construction industry
Technical building regulations in EU countries: a comparison of their organization and formulation.
No full textThe purpose of this paper is to compare technical building regulations in European Union (EU) countries. Three research questions are addressed: what are the main differences and similarities?
what are the main types of organization and formulation? what are the main trends and
developments?
The following tasks were carried out in order to provide an answer to these questions: preparing a questionnaire and obtaining answers from experts of EU countries, collecting and analysing main
building regulations, and comparing results.
The results are that, in the majority of the EU countries, central authorities are involved in setting technical building regulations, however the involvement of regional and local authorities varies.
Technical building regulations can be set in one main document, a coordinated group of
documents or separated legal documents. The formulation adopted for most subjects is
performance based, combined with functional or prescriptive requirements for specific subjects.
Only in England and Wales have technical building regulations a pure functional formulation.
Few countries have official documents with deemed to satisfy solutions. The building regulations include the main subjects (i.e. safety, health, practicability and energy saving), but several countries have no requirements on environmental protection. In the majority of the EU countries,
direct references to specific standards are made, but standards are not accessible free of charge.
There is not a pattern in the way that building regulations apply to construction works in existing buildings.
The main conclusions drawn from the study were that there are five main types of organization and formulation of technical building regulations in the EU countries, as follows: 1) one document with functional requirements and a coordinated group of documents with deemed to satisfy solutions; 2) one document with performance requirements; 3) one document with
prescriptive requirements and new performance regulations on specific subjects; 4) a set of coordinated documents with performance requirements; and, 5) separated legal documents mainly
with performance requirements combined with some prescriptive requirements. Although there are exceptions, a regional distribution was observed in the countries that adopt each type.10 tabelas231 p. (12 p.)DED/NAU201010 a 13 ma
Heuristic Repetitive Activity Scheduling Process for Networking Techniques
No full textProject scheduling is a key activity in construction process. Networking Techniques are useful instruments to accomplish project planning and control. But Networking Techniques develop a discrete model of Construction Process which has instead a continuous nature. New Production theories like Critical Chain or Lean Construction recognize this as a major cause of construction process inefficiency. The difference between model and real building process can lead to managing problems for unexperienced planners, especially in repetitive projects like high rise buildings, housing, highways and other infrastructures, in which crews perform repetitive activities moving from one space unit to another. In particular networking techniques minimize construction total duration but do not satisfy the requirement of work continuity through repetitive units of the project. To satisfy the work continuity constraint many methods have been proposed by researchers and practitioners. Although the effectiveness of these methods, which give notable insights in repetitive construction process, construction scheduling is still performed in most real cases with a commercial software, working with a CPM based network like Precedence Diagramming Method (PDM). The objective of this paper is to present a simple, flexible and easy to implement optimization algorithm for resource-driven scheduling for repetitive projects. The algorithm is based on a PDM network plotted on a resource/space chart, thus identifying resource paths and unit paths in the network. After traditional PDM time analysis is performed, the algorithm seeks, for every repetitive activity to be performed on a repetitive space unit of the project, the Planned Start and the Planned Finish that are best suitable to satisfy the work continuity requirement. In order to maintain minimum project total duration the work continuity requirement is relaxed when encountering a network limit. According with Critical Chain Theory, time buffers are inserted at the end of every resource path, to prevent delays on project completion, due to resource unavailability. The method has been tested on a simple repetitive project from pertinent literature. The proposed algorithm is an heuristic resource-driven scheduling method for repetitive projects, easy to be implemented by practitioners
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
The role of urban built heritage in qualify and quantify resilience. Specific issues in Mediterranean city
Full text linkThe Mediterranean city represents a significant example of urban organism, based on masonry construction and characterized by typological processes of growth. The material consistency and the temporal continuity of built heritage in Mediterranean city make relevant its interpretation and analysis according to the resilient approach. The declination of this approach in many disciplines generated a substantial diversity among the definitions of resilience (Francis and Bekera, 2014).
Consequently, frameworks, adopted for a quantitative or qualitative assessment, underline the lack of standardization and rigor in defining resilience measurements. A review of resilience literature and actual applications in urban context permit to understand that there are different operators working on the field: on the one hand there are international organizations, on the other hand there are academics. The review of both the two ambits of investigation intends to clarify specific properties and convergence points in order to trace an evolution of conceptual framework and to identify general features of urban resilience. This process is fundamental in focusing the main aims of the research program: the definition of the role of urban built heritage, given by the close correlation between masonry constructive technique, typologies and morphologies, its material value in urban system, and its relevance in Mediterranean city in constitution of urban resilience (UNISDR, 2012a). Despite an increasing number of academic studies concerning the role of built environment in defining and improving cities resilience, their major attention is still focused on street patterns and lifelines infrastructures. The paper concludes how the role of built heritage remains insufficiently explored and a correct definition of urban structure is still missing inside the domain of infrastructural resilience
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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