research topics in building construction

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179 Construction Research Topics & Essay Examples

Are you looking for current construction research topics? StudyCorgi has compiled a list of research topics in the construction industry for you! Here, you’ll find hot topics in construction management, safety, building materials, technology, and other construction-related civil engineering ideas. Feel free to use these titles for your essays, presentations, research papers, projects, or even as a starting point in your dissertation research.

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✍️ construction essay topics for college, 👍 good construction research topics & essay examples, 🌶️ hot construction topics, 🎓 most interesting construction essay examples, 💡 current construction article topics, 📌 easy construction essay topics.

• The Social Construction of Gender
• The Social Construction of Gender Roles
• Construction of Wembley’s Stadium: Project Management Methodologies
• Social Construction of Gender and Sexual Dichotomy
• Childhood: The Concept of Social Construction
• Assessing Learning and Test Construction
• Stakeholder Management in Construction Projects
• Environmental Impact of the Football Stadium Construction The construction of Football Stadium in the district of Tipner, Portsmouth, UK is a great challenge for the site’s environments and ecological situation.
• Wood as a Construction Material: History, Properties, Use Today, wood is still a common material in the building of boats and houses. The use of wood in the construction of the frames of a majority of domestic houses is also common.
• Renata SA Construction Company’s Project Management Renata SA is one of the prominent construction companies based in the European Union. It is proficient in handling both private and public construction projects.
• Silver Fiddle Construction Project Risk Management When it comes to defining the key risks associated with the project one must point to the fact that the project is very costly and requires a substantial amount of time.
• Construction Waste Management Managing construction waste is often a difficult process because its poor implementation could lead to unintended consequences for contractors, clients, and the public.
• The Social Construction of Aging The social construction of age states that aging occurs because people explain in their mind and physical stages that the body changes are the aging symptoms.
• Risk Management in Healthcare Construction Projects A risk is any occurrence that has the potential to alter the progress of a project significantly. A risk may be positive or negative.
• Construction of Fertilizer Blending Plants in Nigeria: Cost and Schedule Impact Delving deeper into the development of the project under analysis, one will realize that a unique impediment was encountered as OCP Africa started expanding its services.
• Speech Defending the Construction of Bicycle Lanes The purpose of my appeal to the city authorities and the local community is to build bicycle lanes and to create new bicycle routes.
• Postmodern Feminism and Its Theory of Gender as Social Construction Post modern feminists argue that there are no natural building blocks between genders. It is the society that structures human being in a particular way to keep differences.
• Motivation and Performance in UAE Construction Industry One of the most important revelations in the research was that workers and managers in the UAE construction industry were not motivated.
• A Business Plan for a Home Construction Company This paper is a personal business plan for a small company constructing various buildings for disadvantaged individuals, it will also discuss the key strategies for its foundation.
• Fundamentals of Building Construction Foundations are the basis for any construction object, and it is essential for any project to determine the most fitting type of foundation.
• Concrete as a Construction Material Concrete is one of the most widely used construction materials on Earth, so a more detailed analysis of concrete was taken to realize its pros and cons for construction purposes.
• Investment Strategy: Construction of Portfolio The report selects four best-performing equities based on evaluation taste from ten promising stocks listed in New York Stock Exchange.
• Societal and Gender Construction Affecting Incidents of Domestic Violence The paper intends to explore how societal and gender construction can affect the incidences of domestic violence.
• Evaluating Performance of Public Construction Projects in Abuja, Nigeria The purpose of the paper is to provide an in-depth inquiry into the need for a stakeholder performance evaluation framework for public construction projects in Abuja Nigeria.
• Top Ten Construction Site Hazards. In the construction industry, the laborers and site workers are liable to face innumerable dangers and risks of health and safety each day.
• Construction Project Management and Communication As a project manager, I will communicate with the necessary stakeholders and develop a construction project for the client who purchased the property five years ago.
• Role of Tribes in the Construction of Identity Sine tribes create a sense of belonging by reinforcing the significance of the marker of social hierarchy and the importance of compliance with set traditions.
• Engineering, Procurement and Construction Strategy Saudi Arabia boasts one of the largest oil and gas reserves in the world. The resource is characterized by high price fluctuations that impact the government’s budget.
• Achieving Success in Construction Project Management The effective implementation of construction programs depends on many factors, among which the management of construction organizations can be identified.
• Schedule Delay Analysis in Construction Projects Within a construction environment, it is rather common that both the contractor and employer are worried about the time for performance.
• Dubai Construction Cost and Its Political Factors This research paper determines how political factors affect the construction industry in Dubai and what can be done to lower these costs.
• Lobby Café Construction Project Evaluation The report aimed to analyze three aspects of the Lobby Café Construction project: external factors, stakeholder analysis, and assessment of corporate social responsibility.
• Use of Modern Construction Materials Concrete is an architectural material composed of a strong, noncorrosive particle material called aggregates, typically sand and pebbles.
• Construction and Operation of the London Eye The current assignment examines the construction and operation processes of the London Eye and provides a comprehensive analysis of the project.
• The Construction Management Position Observation Construction projects constantly need modifications, and in this sense, construction management is the key to the stability of the entire procedure.
• Social Construction of Serial Killers Serial killing is a homicide category occurring when an offender murders more than three victims unknown to the criminal.
• Shortage of Skilled Workers in Middle East Construction Industry The construction industry in the Middle East has been facing the risk of rising labour costs and labour shortages, which in turn is squeezing up the smaller contractors.
• Construction Law. Negligence, Tort and Duty of Care The cases Chapman v. Hearse and Voli v IngleWoodshire Council are both legal cases that were tried in the High Court of Australia in the years 1961 and 1963 respectively.
• Construction Industry Disputes in the UAE There is still very little literature in the UAE on the negotiation strategies and how the same impacts on the outcomes in the dispute resolution.
• Soil Mechanics in Construction Engineering Soil mechanics is a relatively new discipline in civil engineering, which entails the study of the engineering properties of soil relative to the design of various engineering structures.
• WestProp Development Ltd.’s Construction Projects WestProp Development Ltd has shown interest in developing 25 North Row W1K6DJ buildings for mixed purposes in Mayfair, London.
• Construction: Characteristics and Reliability of Piles and Props The construction requires a solid and water-resistant system. The secant pile wall provides this opportunity and increased alignment flexibility in construction
• Critical Path Method in Construction Practice The critical path method has a significant role to play in managing resources on construction projects by relating time and money.
• Construction Management and Law in United Kingdom: An Analysis The essay discusses the current legal requirements for constructing a building in the UK and details various legal procedures involved in handling the building projects in the UK.
• The Construction Industry in Australia. The construction industry in Australia commands some significant linkages with other key sectors, and this has led to its major impact on the economy.
• Sexual Orientation as a Social Construction and Reality Even if sexual orientation, gender roles, and sex are all socially constructed, it does not mean that they are not real.
• Gray Construction Company’s Business Communication Gray Construction is a family-owned construction company that, by utilizing the system of open forums, tries to increase the success of business-related communications.
• Saudi Marine Construction Projects and Risks The Saudi Arabian marine construction works revolve around the establishment of ports and harbors. The ports must be constructed to facilitate tourist arrival.
• Construction Project Implementation There are many variations of construction project implementation, the most common are Design-Bid-Build and Multiple Prome Contracts.
• Enhancing Construction Safety Through ASTM Standards and Technology This text discusses the importance of construction safety, focusing on ASTM standards and technological advancements.
• Construction Management at Risk: A New Hospital in Baton Rouge Construction management at risk is the most appropriate project delivery method for the health organization’s plan to build a new hospital in Baton Rouge.
• R. G. Letourneau’s Contributions to the Construction Industry Field The paper states that LeTourneau made tremendous contributions to the construction industry field. His legacy has been a foundation of modern scholars.
• Construction Safety and Its Importance Construction safety is important because working together, the owner and the contractor secure the high quality of work and enhance the general well-being of employees.
• Aspects of Social Construction The paper states that social construction examines how people learn about their surroundings and the world in general, which influences some changes.
• R&B Construction Company: Organizational Culture One of the essential factors in an organization’s success is its culture which are the values, beliefs, and visions that unite an organization.
• The Social Construction of Reality SOLO taxonomy should be considered a valuable analytical instrument in terms of application to the complex challenges of the modern era.
• Why to Learn Construction and Engineering Skills Basic construction and engineering skills can enable a person to successfully engage in the work of their own house and be able to start a new technical career.
• Towards Green Construction: Timber as Material Timber appears to be a beneficial option for the construction of a variety of buildings. Its cost efficiency is evident in the construction process.
• The Aircraft Runways Construction The construction of aircraft runways must be constructed by individual runway design, based on the direction of the winds and aeronautical paths, and immediate terrain.
• Development Plan at Olive Construction Company Olive Construction Company was founded in 2019 to tap into the booming construction industry in Miami Dade County.
• Construction of Knowledge in Society Knowledge is constructed by society facing informational cascades and being disinformed. As a result, people lose confidence in particular institutions.
• Civil Rights Movement and Construction of US Racism Racism is associated with slurs, Islamophobia, police brutality, and Donald Trump. This list signals that racism today is a more insidious, politicized form of discrimination.
• The Influence of the Gospel on the Construction of the Christian Worldview The paper considers the essentials of the Gospel that influence the construction of the Christian worldview and form a behavioral framework.
• Drug Dependency: Construction of a Rehabilitation Center Creating a program that would act as a foundation to help drug addicts recover from drug usage would help lessen drug dependency.
• Progressivism and Its Role in American Social Construction Progressivism arose as political development, its center thought was that administration played a significant part in monetary guidelines and colonial government assistance.
• Social Construction of Race and Gender in the United States and Brazil Being able to categorize the general population into specific groups based on certain characteristics is vital for understanding how people see themselves and others.
• Social Construction of Gender. Sociology in Modules Sociobiology entails the scientific study of social behavior’s biological bases among humans and even animals. It assumes that such behavior arises from the evolution.
• Power Suburbs and the Construction of Race by Nicolaides & Wiese Becky M. Nicolaides and Andrew Wiese discuss suburbanization and its effects on racial segregation in postwar America.
• Foodmart vs. Masterpiece Construction Dispute: Contract Formation The subcontracting of Masterpiece construction in the renovation of Foodmart’s Main Street store is valid and the former has the right to delegate its duties of the contract.
• Construction Materials and Building Codes Platform framing system is commonly used in the building industry because the building that is made using this method is always durable and have high structural integrity.
• Construction Management: Organizations, Cash Flow & Controls on Site This paper discusses organizations, cash flow, and controls on-site: types of organizations, project cash flows, certification programs, cost control as a management tool.
• Water Cooling Tower Construction Site’s Problems The paper highlights three major problems at the construction site. They are security, scheduling, and safety problems.
• The Deployment of WLAN (WI-FI) on Open Area Construction Projects This paper sets out to illustrate that implementation of mobile communication technologies in the construction industry is not only technologically and economically feasible.
• Economic Environment for a Construction Firm The construction industry is plagued by a lot of difficulties in the UK and other parts of the world. This study mainly focuses on economic conditions affecting construction firms.
• GPS Surveying and Laser Total Station Surveying Within Construction This essay intends to establish the main differences between GPS surveying and Laser total station surveying within the construction and single out their respective applications.
• Race: Genetic or Social Construction One of the most challenging questions the community faces today is the following: whether races were created by nature or society or not.
• Tunnel Design and Construction The paper concerns the many significant advances in technology that have facilitated tremendous growth in the tunneling industry.
• Construction of the Sense of Meaning and Identity The most contributing factors to the construction of human sense of meaning and identity are relational processes between person and group, as well as different social processes.
• A New Building Construction Project Analysis The management of AXBC PLC needs to allot more time for constructing a new building as the analysis has clearly shown that the management may be overly optimistic.
• Gender Construction and Heterosexism Homophobia, or the aversion for people who have same-sex preferences, are categorized under personal, interpersonal, institutional and societal.
• The Study of the Construction Methods for Firefighters The study of the construction methods allows the fire officers to predict the effects of the demolition and possible way to preserve the construction in a better condition.
• Construction Companies and Ethics Many construction companies do not have an ethical program at all. It is important that people in the company undergo training in order to understand the ethical standards that have been set.
• Project for the Construction of a New Cottage Town The project is devoted to the building of the new cottage town in the country and is aimed at the satisfaction of citizens’ needs and providing them with a new wonderful way of life.
• Shortage of Skilled Workers and Its Impacts in Middle East Construction Industry Presently there is a huge shortage of structural and civil engineers, project managers, safety managers, on-site supervisors and tradesman, like welders and fitters.
• Construction. The Hines Group and Babcock & Brown The Hines Group and Babcock & Brown provide the highest standards of security of workers and the best organization of the material delivery, storage, and usage.
• The Range of Regulations Applicable to Health and Safety in Construction The regulatory systems have done more good than bad in the general growth of safety conditions for workers in the European Union.
• Carillion Construction Company’s Story of Decline This report analyses the Carillion company’s performance, identifies some causes for its decline, and discusses the roles of the directors and auditors in it.
• Generational Differences in Galliford Try Construction Industry The study illuminates how various challenges affect the company and aligns them with theories such as transformational, authentic, servant leadership and leader-member exchange (LMX).
• Authentic Leadership in the Construction Industry This paper seeks to examine the concept of authentic leadership and why it can become the best option for improving management and supervision in the construction industry.
• Family, Work, and Social Construction of Intimacy The paper examines various aspects of family life and the real problems of families. The work-family relationship may sometimes result in work-family conflict.
• “Uncoupling: The Social Construction of Divorce” by Robboy et al. This paper aims to analyze the article “Uncoupling: The Social Construction of Divorce” by Robboy et al. and summarize the main ideas from it.
• Ethics: Tellico Dam Construction vs. Snail Darter Fish The argument against the Tellico dam construction concerns the role of the snail darter in the ecological system of the Little Mississippi River.
• Poverty and Homelessness: Dimensions and Constructions With the growth of the economy and the failure of employment, the number of people living in poverty and without shelter increases.
• Race as a Social Construction in the US The idea of the social construction of race is the basis on which modern theory refutes the initial assumptions used to justify the American practice of slavery.
• Cultural Rift in the UAE Construction Industry This paper will explore cultural differences and organizational cultures in the UAE. It will also explore ways of harmonizing the two to minimize conflicts.
• Portfolio Construction: Choosing a Suitable Investment Option Investing in trustworthy and promising ventures so that the specified goal can be achieved can be viewed as the secondary objective of the project.
• Risk Management of Construction Megaprojects Long-term projects can be considered an integral part of the modern world. At the same time, the management of projects is a complex task because of many issues and obstacles.
• Construction Company’s Operational Risk Management This work presents an operational risk assessment connected to standard masonry techniques and procedures in the development of five-story apartment blocks.
• Canadian Housing and Construction Statistics Growth for housing starts, completions, and under construction was negatively affected by the economic downturn in 2008 with only 187,923 units registered.
• Truss Construction Shop Workplace Incident This paper analyzes the incident that occurred in the Truss Construction Shop when a worker was injured while performing his work with the help of a machine.
• Quality Improvement in the Construction Industry’ Context Focusing on quality improvement is essential in the context of a multicultural corporation. The introduction of the Six Sigma DMAIC framework was tested as a possible tool.
• Construction Company’s Staff’s Quality Performance The purpose of the study is the identification of the links between the application of the diversity-related strategies, the motivation of the employees, and the staff’s rates.
• Madina Azahra Palace Construction Medina Azahara means the City of Flowers and it represents the ruins of the fortified Arab Muslim medieval palace in Spain. The palace was built in 929 by Abd al-Rahman.
• Social Construction of Technologies: Tablet Computer This paper is aimed at discussing the development of such a technology as the tablet computer. In particular, it is necessary to apply such a concept as social construction.
• “The Construction of Homosexuality” a Book by David Greenberg The book, The Construction of Homosexuality by David Greenberg presents the reflection of the author on historical timeline of the struggle by homosexuals to get their rights.
• Construction of the America’s Great Wall The paper highlights some of the reasons why the Great Wall was a bad idea. The government realized that the control act did not give the expected results.
• Social Community Constructions, Expected Social Conduct, and Economic Structures Within the Society This paper outlines social community constructions, expected social conduct, and economic structures within the society.
• Intermediate Institutions and Technology Transfer in Developing Countries: Construction Industry in Ghana
• Building for the Future: The Potential Importance of the Construction Industry in Welsh Economic Development Policy
• Global Construction Equipment Market Industry Analysis
• Waste Processing Plants Construction in Saudi Arabia
• Investigation Into Waste Management on Construction Sites in South Western Nigeria
• Waste Processing Plants Construction in India
• Improving Health and Safety on Construction in Romania
• Channel Tunnel Construction: Project Management
• Indonesia Residential Construction: Market Update
• Improving Higher Education for Construction Management
• Worker’s Attitudes Towards Safety in the Construction Field
• Case Studies About Australian Construction Firms
• Chinese Culture and Successful Implementation of Partnering in Singapore’s Construction Industry
• Iowa River Bridge Steel Method Construction
• Civil Engineering: Bridge Construction Issues
• Good Research Paper About Planning of Construction of Tall Buildings
• Transforming Municipal Solid Waste Into Construction Materials
• Chemical and Pharmaceutical Plants Construction in India to 2019
• Building Information Modelling Analysis Construction
• Ethical Case Study Bhopal Disaster Construction
• Global Market for Agricultural and Construction Equipment
• Ireland Industrial Construction: Market Update
• Incorporating the Lean Cell Process Into Repair Stations Construction
• Environmental Impacts From Dam Construction
• Improving Construction Site Safety
• Internet Marketing Strategy for Small Construction Firms
• Cdm Baseline Construction for Vietnam National Electricity Grid
• Analyzing the Malaysian Construction Industry
• Building Plan Commission, Construction, and Alterations
• Commercial Bank Lending Practices and the Development of Black-Owned Construction Companies
• Industry Research- Construction, Homebuilding
• Housing Demand and Residential Construction in Thailand
• Establishing Quantitative Indicators for Measuring the Partnering Performance of Construction Projects in Hong Kong
• Establishing the Association Between Collaborative Working and Construction Project Performance Based on Client and Contractor Perceptions
• Institutional Capacity for Climate Change Responses: An Examination of Construction and Pathways in Mexico City and Santiago
• Innovative Construction Technology for Affordable Mass Housing in Tanzania, East Africa
• Collaboration Environments for Small and Medium-Sized Architecture, Engineering and Construction Enterprises
• Total Quality Management and the Learning Organization: A Dialogue for Change in Construction
• Client-Led Strategies for Construction Supply Chain Improvement
• Indian Construction Industry and Risk Assessment Construction
• Analyzing the Drivers for Early Contractor Involvement Adoption by Construction Clients
• International Construction: Floor Packaging Method
• How Dilation Was Used in the Construction of the Pyramids of Egypt
• Workplace Injuries and Fatalities in the UK Industry Construction
• Close Entanglements: Aligning the Construction and Finance Industries
• Interaction Between the Economic Growth and the Construction Industry
• Germany’s Construction Industry: Stabilization on the Horizon
• Welfare Facilities During Construction Work
• The Ethical Issue, or Issues, Affecting the Construction Industry Today
• Whether the Construction Industry Is the Pillar Industry in Hong Kong?
• United Kingdom Residential Construction: Market Update
• Issues, Problems and Risks in Construction Projects and Ways of Mitigating Them
• Good Faith and Co-operation Under Construction Contracts in UK
• Health and Safety Considerations for the Construction
• Worker Flows, Entry and Productivity in the New Zealand Construction Industry
• Building Methods and Policies That Govern the Construction
• Building Construction Types for People in the Fire Service Field
• Ziggurats Their Construction and Uses in Ancient Mesopotamia Irrigation Systems
• Greece Industrial Construction: Market Update
• Business E-solutions for Small Construction Companies
• Architect E.j Lennox’s American Courthouse Construction
• Houston and the Global Market for Engineering and Construction
• Waste Minimizing and Recycling in Construction
• Understanding the Divergence Between Output and Employment in the UK Construction Industry
• Information Technology and the Construction Contractor
• Capital Structure and Return on Capital Employed of Construction Companies in Nigeria
• Intellectual Capital, Knowledge Sharing, and Innovation Performance: Evidence From the Chinese Construction Industry
• Workflow Software for Building and Construction Companies
• German Construction Industry: New Residential Construction at Cyclical Peak – Public Construction Gaining Ground
• Transaction-Related Issues and Construction Project Performance
• Chinese Urban Residential Construction to 2040
• Work Health and Safety, Competitive Advantage, and Organisational Performance in Small Construction Firms

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StudyCorgi . "179 Construction Research Topics & Essay Examples." September 9, 2021. https://studycorgi.com/ideas/construction-essay-topics/.

StudyCorgi . 2021. "179 Construction Research Topics & Essay Examples." September 9, 2021. https://studycorgi.com/ideas/construction-essay-topics/.

These essay examples and topics on Construction were carefully selected by the StudyCorgi editorial team. They meet our highest standards in terms of grammar, punctuation, style, and fact accuracy. Please ensure you properly reference the materials if you’re using them to write your assignment.

This essay topic collection was updated on June 21, 2024 .

Buildings & Cities

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• Collection: Modern methods of construction: beyond productivity improvement

Modern methods of construction: reflections on the current research agenda

• Stuart D. Green

Modern methods of construction (MMC) comprise a value-laden and highly flexible discourse. Nevertheless, the constituent narratives have long-lasting consequences for the material fabric of the built environment. Current policy sources can be seen to possess an embedded pro-innovation bias that offsets any appetite for evidence-based research, especially that which relates to the mistakes of the past. Many policy narratives in favour of MMC are further characterised by an exaggerated sense of hubris, with an in-built institutionalised preference for disruptive innovation. Liberalised economies are especially prone to technological optimism, with a tendency to cast regulation as a barrier to be overcome. The Grenfell Tower tragedy provides a stark reminder of the limitations of viewing regulation solely through the lens of innovation. Hence, it illustrates how the prevailing built environment research–policy consensus has failed the civil society which it purportedly serves. These failings should be of concern to those who privilege evidence-based research as a means of negating the alarming onset of the post-truth society. Research is required that looks beyond the imperatives of narrowly defined productivity. It is essential that policy narratives such as MMC are fully explored in terms of their short-, medium- and long-term implications.

• construction industry
• fire safety
• Grenfell Tower
• modern methods of construction
• policy narratives

1. Background

The primary aim in proposing this special issue on modern methods of construction (MMC) was to broaden the debate beyond the current narrowly construed obsession with the supposed productivity benefits. The call for papers stated a need to examine the assumptions underpinning MMC and the associated unintended consequences. Any incremental shift towards the increased industrialisation of construction is likely to have longstanding implications for the sector at large. But more importantly, it is also likely to have enduring consequences for the material fabric of the built environment. Given the chequered history of previous attempts at industrialisation, the prevailing presumption in favour of MMC is undoubtedly deserving of critique. This is especially true given that the current policy debate privileges hype over research-based evidence. Yet, the response to the call for papers was undeniably disappointing.

A total of 15 abstracts were submitted for the special issue. Of these, eight were invited for development into full papers. This resulted in six full submissions being sent out to peer review; four were subsequently rejected and two were eventually accepted for publication ( Table 1 ). All submissions were reviewed in accordance with the same rigorous standards as applied to all papers published by Buildings & Cities . The quality of the two accepted papers stands as testimony to the rigour of the peer-review process. Before discussing the published papers, it is appropriate to offer a few reflections on why there was relatively little interest in the call for papers.

Articles in this special issue ‘Modern Methods of Construction: Beyond Productivity Improvement’, Buildings & Cities (2022), 3(1); guest editor Stuart D. Green.

2. Problems of definition

It is appropriate to begin with the issue of definition. Defining precisely what is meant by MMC is by no means straightforward. Indeed, the essential vagueness of such ideas can be seen as an essential prerequisite of their success. The attractiveness of MMC is undoubtedly enhanced by its appeal to notions of modernity. Yet, modernity is hardly a new idea. In truth, the origins of MMC can be traced back some considerable time. Direct antecedents include industrialised building ( Diamant 1964 ; Dietz & Cutler 1971 ), system building ( Finnimore 1989 ; Grindrod 2013 ) and offsite prefabrication ( Gibb 1999 ; Pan et al . 2007 ). Industrialisation has played an especially important role in the context of state-sponsored mass housing ( Glendinning 2021 ). Prefabricated houses have further been cited as ‘architecture’s oldest newest idea’ ( Blanchet & Zhuravlyova 2018 ). Isambard Kingdom Brunel is rightly famous for his railway engineering, but he is also celebrated for his prefabricated hospital constructed on the southern shores of the Dardanelles during the Crimean War (1853–56). Other antecedents include the use of prefabricated modules in the construction in 1851 of the Crystal Palace exhibition hall in London. The Scandinavian tradition of prefabrication can even be traced back as far as the Vikings ( Price 2020 ). It is further clear that the popularity of such methods has ebbed and flowed over time, with as many recorded failures as there are successes ( Gibb 2001 ). The debate often takes place within the context of housing, where there is seen to be significant scope for economies of scale based on standardisation. Yet, substantial uptake has invariably been dependent upon a degree of state subsidy to offset the risk of demand volatility ( cf . Rosenfeld 1994 ; Boughton 2018 ). The advocates of MMC often notably emphasise the importance of increasing pre-manufactured value (PMV). Yet, little research addresses the externalities beyond the narrow drivers of time, cost, quality and productivity ( cf . Pan et al . 2007 ). As ever, the employment conditions and lived realities of construction workers attract little attention ( Ness & Green 2012 ).

MMC is also perhaps already falling victim to what might be described as the ‘beyond the beyond myth’ ( cf . De Cock & Hipkin 1997 ). In response to criticism, the leading advocates of MMC often claim to have ‘moved beyond’ MMC to become advocates of some other ill-defined recipe. ‘Platform approaches’ are currently popular, and equally vague. Hence, it is only though critique that recipes such as MMC become properly defined, and their limitations exposed. In short, the champions of modernisation quickly move on to the next ill-defined recipe while denying any responsibility for the shortcomings of what came before. The danger is that this process continuously repeats itself. Unfortunately, decisions made in the name of MMC have long-lasting material consequences. It is here that the research community has a responsibility to act as an institutional memory.

3. Pro-innovation bias

The literature on MMC is characterised by a strong pro-innovation bias. The predisposition in favour of MMC is even more pronounced among policy makers. Such tendencies are of course by no means new. There is a long tradition of policy makers advocating simplistic technological fixes in response to complex and politically contested problems. Indeed, the history of the construction sector is littered with supposed panaceas derived from the application of modern technology. Yet, there remains a stubborn resistance to learning the lessons from previous such attempts. There is also a recurring tendency towards technological determinism, with little recognition of the possibility of unintended consequences ( Green 2019 ).

Insights can also be gained by understanding how policy narratives are structured. There is a propensity to emphasise that the construction sector is in some way ‘backward’, not least in its failure to adopt modern technology ( Farmer 2016 ). The advocated technologies are also habitually promulgated as a means of overcoming a proclaimed crisis. Prominence is sometimes given to the ‘productivity crisis’, usually with limited effort to engage with the relevant research literature. The other popular target is the ‘skills crisis’, with a similar lack of interest in the research literature relating to construction sector skills. Politicians are especially fond of citing industrialisation as a means of solving the ‘housing crisis’. Such simplistic narratives are in truth part of the problem. The constituent arguments in support of MMC are invariably framed very narrowly, with little recognition of the contested nature of the supposed crises at which they are aimed. For clarity, it is not that extensive research of the three highlighted topics does not exist. The problem is that such research does not easily fit with the pro-innovation bias of policy narratives in support of MMC. Pro-innovation bias might otherwise be construed as gung-ho boosterism. The built environment deserves better.

4. Learning from the past

Despite the heady talk of innovation, pre-assembled construction components are still routinely installed on site by labour-only subcontractors. Too often the work is performed by semi-skilled operatives subject to a bare minimum of supervision. Despite the overblown claims made in respect of factory-based ‘precision engineering’, consideration rarely extends to the problems that occur at the interfaces between different systems. There are important precedents from which one can learn. For example, the large panel system (LPS) approach to prefabrication was widely used for high-rise residential blocks in the 1960s. The method comprised the vertical stacking of prefabricated concrete panels. It performed very well in terms of productivity; such prefabricated concrete systems were deliberately incentivised as a means of increasing housing output. Public trust evaporated following the Ronan Point collapse in Newham, London, in 1968. A subsequent public inquiry pointed towards appallingly poor workmanship in the connections between panels. Many such buildings were demolished within 15 years due to structural deterioration and sky-rocketing remediation costs. In 1984, Geoffrey Lofthouse MP famously presented the following question during a parliamentary debate on defects in systems-built housing:

We must also ask whether sufficient time and money is spent in appraising new methods of building, and new components and materials. As an example, the Agrément certificate procedure is very weak, and gives little real assessment of how building will work out in practice. (Hansard, 12 March 1984)

The above question remains especially pertinent in the wake of London’s Grenfell Tower tragedy of 2017 and the ongoing international cladding crisis. Yet, at the time of writing, the UK government’s stated presumption in favour of MMC remains firmly in place. Hence, there is sufficient cause to be cautious of any pro-innovation bias in the advocacy of construction methods.

Certainly, there would seem to be much to be learnt by studying the failures and successes of previous attempts at industrialised building, not least in terms of how and when success might most meaningfully be judged. Experience shows that too much emphasis on short-term measures of success, such as construction productivity, is ill-placed given the longevity of buildings. Yet, built environment policymakers have long since championed the cause of construction sector competitiveness over that of building performance. Policymakers have seemingly forgotten that building performance should be judged at multiple points throughout the building’s life cycle, rather than at the single arbitrary point of ‘completion’. Huge questions also remain about the malleability of modular buildings over time, not least in terms of their adaptability to changing patterns of use ( Brand 1994 ; Patel & Green 2020 ). There is a notable sparsity of research into how buildings constructed using MMC lend themselves to retrofit in accordance with the demands of the circular economy. In truth, the advocates of MMC have little appetite for research of this nature. The research that is valued is that which focuses on overcoming the barriers to an approach to which they are already committed. This should be of concern to those who value independent evidence-based research.

5. Hubris and disruptive innovation

Of further concern is the extent to which the current UK policy debate in support of MMC suffers from an overriding sense of hubris. The prevailing emphasis lies on how barriers to innovation might be best overcome. The advocates of MMC unfailingly present themselves as champions of modernisation. The hubristic narratives of MMC can perhaps be best understood as identity work on the part of those involved ( cf . Sergeeva & Green 2019 ). Such identity work is invariably aimed at gaining entry to policy circles. There is a further observable tendency to castigate the voices of caution as being misguided defenders of the ‘traditional’. Dissenters are seen as outdated in their attitudes, and complacent in the face of a construction sector which is irrevocably old-fashioned and resistant to change. The choice presented by Farmer ( 2016 ) is evident in the title of his report: Modernise or Die .

The nonsense of the above presented binary division lies in the high reported number of failures of supposedly disruptive innovators. Katerra in the US is perhaps the most obvious example ( Rabeneck 2021 ). There have also been numerous highly publicised failures of modular firms within the UK, including the joint venture previously launched with great fanfare by Urban Splash ( Clark 2022 ). It is of course to be expected that some start-ups will succeed and others will fail. The most cited reason that modular firms go out of business is that the order book was insufficient to service the relatively high set-up costs. In other words, capital productivity too often falls below the expectations of the investors. Labour productivity on-site may well be improved, but capital productivity in the factory is by no means guaranteed. Such failures serve to emphasise the difference in predicted lifespan between buildings and modular start-up companies. They further raise questions regarding the extent to which prefabricated components are malleable over time in accordance with the different service lives of the embedded constituent systems and the needs of through-life retrofit.

Current champions of MMC arguably differ from their predecessors in the extent to which they align themselves with notions of digital transformation. The favoured narrative plays homage at the altar of the Fourth Industrial Revolution as advocated by global consultancies such as McKinsey & Co. ( 2016 ). The advent of ‘Industry 4.0’ is held to have fundamental implications for the business models of the future. Indicative technologies include the Internet of Things (IoT), robotics, big data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, advanced embedded sensors and digital platforms. So-called smart factories hence become of key importance to the development of MMC. The overriding tone is one of unfettered technological optimism. Disruptive innovation is invariably taken for granted as an inherently ‘good thing’. Such storylines were eminently evident in the hype that surrounded Katerra before its demise in 2021. The point is not to deny the potential benefits of such technologies, but rather to highlight the dangers that they become ‘technologies of distraction’. Technological optimism is fine insofar as it goes. However, the materiality of our built infrastructure is of fundamental importance to the human condition. It has implications across the entire range of policy areas, including health, education, housing and commerce. The buildings being built need to be resilient. They need to be adaptable for uses that were not envisaged at the point of inception. Above all else, they need to be safe. Hence, it is important to find an appropriate balance between innovation and regulation. To strive for such a balance is central to any measured sense of professionalism, which sadly seems to be in terminal decline.

6. Governance and the war on ‘red tape’

Of further concern is the recurring policy emphasis within liberalised economies on the removal of regulatory barriers, invariably presented as needless ‘red tape’. Regulation should be kept under constant review, but it has undoubtedly played a crucial role in improving the safety of the buildings when they are occupied. The same is also true of the health and safety regulations that govern on-site construction. Indeed, regulations are often developed in response to specific tragedies—Ronan Point being a case in point. Regulations are there for a purpose and are not to be jettisoned lightly. Yet, policies in support of regulation have been in widespread retreat within liberalised economies since the 1980s. Governments that prioritise the discourse of competitiveness routinely announce ‘bonfires of red tape’, which they seemingly see as an essential part of their modernisation agenda ( Green et al . 2008 ). This has been especially pronounced in recent years within the UK, but also throughout the English-speaking world. Less dramatic is the erosion of the regulatory system through systemic neglect, weakened enforcement and the progressive withdrawal of funding. In the context of UK housing, all three variants are cited as being directly implicated in the regulatory failures that led to the Grenfell Tower disaster ( Hodkinson 2019 ).

Good regulation is an intrinsic component of modernity. Few would wish to return to the laissez faire approaches of the 19th century. Sometimes it is important to remind ourselves that modernity is not necessarily a linear progression. The advocates of MMC do not embrace modern employment practices such as those advocated by the Taylor Report ( Taylor 2017 ), and neither do they embrace modern approaches to compliance and regulation. The current trend towards so-called platform approaches can perhaps be described as the ‘Uberisation’ of the construction sector whereby the reliance on the gig economy is progressively normalised. Hence, the modernisation on offer is limited to the variant of technological optimism.

7. The legacy of Grenfell

The dangers of consistently privileging innovation over regulation have been ruthlessly exposed by the public inquiry into the Grenfell Tower fire which resulted in the deaths of 72 residents. Although the final report has yet to be published, a wealth of evidence points towards systemic failings within the regulatory system. Of particular note is the way the UK’s independent material testing capability was allegedly compromised by the privatisation of the Building Research Establishment (BRE). Notwithstanding the subsequent Building Safety Act 2022, serious doubts remain regarding how meaningful regulation might best be implemented within the context of a liberalised economy. Continued hubristic hype in support of supposed panaceas such as MMC does not help, and neither will any subtle linguistic shift towards vaguely defined ‘digital platforms’.

It is further important to recall that the Grenfell Inquiry identified the installed aluminium composite material (ACM) cladding panels as the primary cause of the external fire spread on Grenfell Tower. The use of such innovative construction materials was undoubtedly legitimised by the all-prevailing narrative in support of innovation and MMC. Yet, at the time of writing, the UK government’s ‘presumption in favour’ of MMC remains firmly intact ( HM Government 2020 ; Green 2021 ). The lobbying power of the global materials industry can further be seen to have appropriated the narrative of MMC for promotional purposes. Despite the findings of the Grenfell Inquiry, numerous firms continue to sell their products under the legitimising label of MMC. In the wake of Grenfell, any meaningful research agenda relating to MMC must surely embrace issues of appropriate regulation.

8. Reluctance to challenge mainstream policy narratives

Perhaps most disturbing of all is the way the bias in favour of disruptive innovation is evident across the institutional landscape of research funding. It is no coincidence that the UK’s leading public research funding agency is labelled ‘UK Research and Innovation’. Indeed, the discursive linking of ‘research’ and ‘innovation’ is so commonplace it is invariably taken for granted. Hence, there are few incentives for research that calls into question supposed innovations such as MMC. Dissent within the research community is further discouraged by a perceived risk of being barred from construction policy circles, and from publication in leading journals. In the author’s personal experience such constraints are more imagined than real. Yet even the professional institutions fall in line with the omnipotent discourse of innovation rather than defend the importance of detached professionalism ( cf . Green et al . 2008 ). But the biggest constraints are undoubtedly those the research community imposes on itself. Researchers are too often content to pursue their chosen research specialisms without critically engaging with mainstream policy narratives. This could perhaps account in part for the disappointing number of submissions to the current special issue.

As a caveat to the above, it is important to note that there is a plethora of relevant research being undertaken—both within the UK and internationally. It is perhaps more a case of researchers not choosing to align their research with policy narratives which they view as essentially transient and trivial. Therefore, they choose not to engage. Those who do engage are also at risk from the ‘beyond the beyond myth’. Hence, there is a danger that they align their research with MMC only to find the bandwagon has moved on.

There is also an argument that those who seek to critique narratives such as MMC are themselves complicit in their reproduction. Such an argument may indeed have legitimacy within the ivory towers of academia. But the unchallenged advocacy of MMC has consequences, not only for the construction sector, but also for the material fabric of the built environment. The relative lack of interest in the current special issue is hence indicative of a wider problem. What is required is a more balanced research agenda on the topic of MMC for the purposes of ensuring policymakers are better informed. The scope of such research would hence extend beyond narrowly defined labour productivity to embrace the full range of externalities relating to any progressive shift to an increased proportion of PMV. But policymakers are seemingly not interested. They have apparently already decided that MMC is a good idea. In time, the narrative will undoubtedly move on to the next supposed panacea. However, the likelihood is that the stark disconnect between policy and research will continue.

9. Future research agenda

In looking towards the need for future research, very little evidence exists on the implications of MMC for the material fabric of the built environment. There is also a recurring reluctance to investigate and learn the lessons from previous attempts at the industrialisation of construction. This is of particular concern within the context of housing, although it applies equally to other sectors. A lack of data exists on the implications of MMC for the performance and longevity of buildings, and their ability to respond over time to shifting societal and occupant needs. The durability and adaptability of buildings are of central importance for both resource consumption and the achievement of a net-zero carbon economy. Further concerns relate to environmental performance and occupant wellbeing. Even more importantly, significant concerns remain regarding the implications of MMC for fire safety ( Davis 2019 ).

Any significant increase in the proportion of PMV is also likely to have systemic consequences for the economic structure of the sector. Particular concerns relate to employment practices and the potentially adverse implications for skills within local communities. The increasing emphasis on PMV further exposes the construction sector to competition from global manufacturing firms, with significant implications for barriers to entry and the national balance of payments. Additional questions relate to a lack of transparency in global supply chains, with direct implications for the risk of labour exploitation. The outsourcing of sub-assembly processes to geographically remote locations further raises serious questions about regulatory regimes in respect of environmental protection. Of no lesser importance are the added challenges of ensuring compliance with building standards and codes.

The label of MMC may well be replaced in time by some other faddish representations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, but the above concerns will remain. The research community cannot afford to be dismissive of the potential of new technologies. But neither can it afford to be beguiled by hubristic narratives. Both civil society and government depend upon independent, robust critical enquiry and clear evidence on which to base individual and collective decisions. Research in the public interest is a principle and practice that needs defending.

10. Contributions to this special issue

The safety of the building in use and the potential risks to occupants are vital issues. Meacham focuses on the fire performance and regulatory considerations associated with MMC. He argues that the adoption of MMC presents challenges to traditional building regulatory approaches. Particular attention is focused on the void spaces between prefabricated components, and especially those that exist between prefabricated modules. These voids—both vertical and horizontal—potentially serve as avenues not only for the spread of fire but also for the spread of smoke and toxic gases. The correct on-site installation of appropriate fire cavity barriers hence becomes of critical concern. Of further note is that the installation of such barriers cannot be easily checked after the event. This raises concerns regarding on-site supervision and the dangers of neglecting the importance of training for those operatives upon whom modular fabricators rely.

Meacham further points towards fire performance concerns with MMC materials. He argues that these concerns are exacerbated by the encapsulation of MMC components and the extent to which they are in proximity to voids. Although individual components may meet fire performance requirements under defined test conditions, this may not be true once they are embodied within MMC systems.

Meacham offers a compelling overview of the distinction between prescriptive and functional approaches to regulation. He further differentiates functional approaches in accordance with the degree of government oversight vis-à-vis reliance on market responsibility. Of particular interest are the regulatory trajectories of different countries. The approach in the US is seen to be predominantly prescriptive, with a defined and broadly understood process for assuring quality in the fabrication process. In contract, functional approaches focus on identifying performance requirements without specifying how they are to be met. Countries that combine this approach with strong government oversight include Singapore and Japan. The third approach is the adoption of a functional approach coupled with a reliance on the mechanisms of the market rather than direct state involvement. Examples of the latter approach include the UK and the Netherlands. Such differences in regulatory approaches render simplistic international comparisons problematic. However, many Commonwealth countries notably follow the regulatory practices adopted in the UK, thus contributing to the internationalisation of the cladding crisis.

In closing, Meacham observes that MMC comprises complex ‘systems of systems’ for which the assurance of fire performance present unique challenges. He argues that our success in delivering safe buildings depends upon an engrained safety culture in which the safety of occupants is more important than financial gain. This paper deserves to be read widely, and its recommendations need to be actioned.

Dowsett et al . offer something different. They take a broad interpretation of MMC as comprising one of many possible constituent technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Their particular interest lies in manufacturing robotics. They argue that current debates are too often dominated by notions of ‘technological prediction’. These are held to be of limited use to practitioners in that they offer limited insights into how such technologies are likely to play out in a highly heterogeneous construction sector. The authors describe an empirical study where invited practitioners were exposed to four competing scenarios. They especially privilege the views of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) which are held to be more representative of the construction sector than tier 1 contractors. Their justification is that SMEs do not tend to get much airtime in mainstream policy debates about MMC. Indeed, if they are mentioned at all, they are often simplistically depicted as ‘barriers’ that stand in the way of progress. As an aside, tier 1 contractors have long since divorced themselves from the physical task of construction ( Green 2011 ). Hence, it could be argued that they have been operating a platform-based business model even before the terminology became fashionable.

Dowsett et al . further draw from previous research to highlight the complex and diverse interactions between new technologies and the processes within which they are embedded. They argue that foresight-type approaches invariably offer unrealistic and anodyne visions of the future. As an intriguing alternative, they propose a scenario-planning approach rooted in the tradition of storytelling. The adopted approach notably uses images and objects for the purposes of capturing the interest of the participants.

The first developed scenario envisages a vertically integrated construction sector dominated by five mega-contractors. In contrast, the second foresees an industry dominated by software venders and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). The third scenario portrays a sector comprising regional networks of SME collectives. The fourth and final scenario comprises a nationalised construction sector governed by a national construction board. There was a time, of course, in the 1970s when UK building industry nationalisation was a realistic prospect, serious enough to justify the major contractors funding the Campaign Against Building Industry Nationalisation (CABIN).

The paper describes the reactions of the participants to each of the four scenarios, with an appropriate emphasis on the extent to which they might facilitate the increased utilisation of manufacturing robotics. Needless to say, the fourth scenario evoked the strongest negative reaction. Ultimately, the authors offer the adopted scenario-building approach as a means through which visions of the future are co-created with the active participation of those at the ‘coalface’ of construction The paper undoubtedly contains much food for thought. It further serves as an important anecdote to the top-down technological determinism that too often prevails. It might also provide a methodology for structuring a much broader and more realistic debate about the future role of robotics in construction. Policymakers take note.

11. Creating further evidence

This editorial and accompanying two papers are not intended to comprise the final word on the sparsity of research relating to MMC. In contrast, they are seen to provide an important beginning. Buildings & Cities will continue to welcome papers that examine the unintended consequences of construction innovations such as MMC. Research papers that address the inherent tension between innovation and the societal need for regulation will be especially welcome. Innovation can never be fully evaluated solely based on narrowly defined productivity improvement. Account must also be taken of its wider implications for the material fabric of the built environment, and for the lived realties of those who occupy the buildings that are designed and constructed.

The occupants and victims of the Grenfell Tower tragedy have undoubtedly been let down by the liberalisation of the UK’s approach to regulation. But similar failings have occurred globally, as evidenced by the international nature of the cladding crisis. But the Grenfell tragedy also constitutes a failure on the part of the international research community, not least in terms of privileging the needs of the construction and real estate sectors over those of civil society. Researchers frequently point towards the decline of professionalism among practitioners, but researchers must also strive to serve a broader diversity of interest groups. Over the last four decades researchers have allowed themselves to become too constrained in the research questions that are set out to be explored. The next generation of researchers must do better. Research must look beyond the short-term imperatives of narrowly defined productivity. Independent evidence can save lives and avoid costly remediation programmes. It is therefore essential that policy narratives such as MMC are thoroughly considered for their short-, medium- and long-term implications.

Competing interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.

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Paradigm Shifts in Building Construction Priorities in the Last Decade

• Review Article
• Published: 28 August 2024

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• Suchi Priyadarshani   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-0757-8716 1 ,
• Roshan R. Rao 1 &
• Monto Mani 1  

Buildings are amongst the fundamental needs to human settlements. Present construction industry accounts for nearly 40% of the global GHG emissions. With the raising concerns due to climate change, and corresponding global temperature rise, sustainable practices in building construction is of paramount importance. This article discusses the developments in building technologies focusing on energy efficiency, low carbon, and comfortable & healthy building practices in the last decade. Areas of key technical advancement, current trends in their application, challenges, and potential future research directions have been discussed.

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Priyadarshani, S., Rao, R.R. & Mani, M. Paradigm Shifts in Building Construction Priorities in the Last Decade. J Indian Inst Sci (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41745-024-00437-5

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Construction Engineering Dissertation Topics

Published by Carmen Troy at January 5th, 2023 , Revised On May 20, 2024

The development of construction engineering has significantly influenced the way our society has grown over the last few decades. Recent research in sustainable construction has been much emphasised in the civil engineering industry. The world is now moving towards systems that are considered adaptable, sustainable, viable, and environmentally friendly.

Many developed countries, including the United Kingdom, have developed pathways towards this future in Vision 2030 and even 2050. There are various exciting research opportunities for students when selecting their construction engineering dissertation topic .

To help you get started with brainstorming for construction engineering topic ideas, we have developed a list of the latest topics that can be used for writing your construction engineering dissertation.

These topics have been developed by PhD-qualified writers of our team , so you can trust to use these topics for drafting your dissertation.

You may also want to start your dissertation by requesting  a brief research proposal  from our writers on any of these topics, which includes an  introduction  to the topic,  research question ,  aim and objectives ,  literature review  along with the proposed  methodology  of research to be conducted.  Let us know  if you need any help in getting started.

Check our  dissertation examples  to get an idea of  how to structure your dissertation .

Review the full list of  dissertation topics for 2022 here.

Latest Construction Engineering Dissertation Topics

Topic 1: the impact of virtual reality on enhancing customer experience and decreasing on-site visits to construction projects.

Research Aim: The aim is to evaluate the impact of virtual reality on enhancing customer experience and decreasing on-site visits to construction projects

Objectives:

• To understand the significance of incorporating VR in the UK construction projects
• To analyse the effect of VR on enhancing customer experience
• To examine the impact of VR on reducing the number of on-site visits

Topic 2: The incorporation of AI in UK based construction projects to forecast costs accurately and mitigate safety and productivity issues

Research Aim: The aim focuses on examining how the incorporation of AI in UK construction projects can help in forecasting costs accurately and mitigating safety and productivity issues

• To explore the significance of incorporating AI in construction projects
• To evaluate how forecasting of costs can be done accurately with the incorporation of AI in the UK construction projects
• To understand how safety and productivity issues can be mitigated effectively with the integration of AI in UK construction projects

Topic 3: The impact of workforce restrictions and supply chain disruptions due to the coronavirus pandemic on the growth of the UK construction sector

Research Aim: The research aim concentrates on exploring the impact of workforce restrictions and supply chain disruptions due to the coronavirus pandemic on the growth of the UK construction sector

• To evaluate the different impacts of the coronavirus pandemic on the UK construction sector
• To determine how supply chain disruptions due to the pandemic have influenced the growth of the UK construction sector
• To examine how workforce restrictions due to this pandemic have impacted the growth of the UK construction sector

Topic 4: The importance of five elements of Business Information Modeling and how these elements of BIM are minimising operation costs and increasing the productivity in UK construction projects

Research Aim: The aim is to evaluate the importance of five elements of Business Information Modeling and how these elements of BIM are minimising operation costs and increasing productivity in UK construction projects

Objectives :

• To understand Business Information Modeling and its five elements
• To determine how these elements of BIM are minimising operation costs in the UK based construction projects
• To examine how these elements of BIM are increasing the productivity  in the UK based construction projects

Topic 5: An examination of different ways through which a site waste management plan in UK construction projects helps in using recyclable products and mitigating contamination

Research Aim: The research aim explores different ways through which a site waste management plan in UK construction projects helps in using recyclable products and mitigating contamination

• To examine the importance of the site waste management plan in UK construction projects
• To determine how an efficient site waste management plan can help in recycling waste products
• To evaluate how an efficient site waste management plan can aid in mitigating contamination

List Of Top Construction Engineering Dissertation Topics

• Utilisation of renewable energy resources in the development of sustainable homes
• Sustainability and its impact on societies; Visualising a constructive future.
• Achieving sustainability from properties of concrete; Analyses of the recent research and developments.
• The lean manufacturing techniques and the role of management in construction
• Construction Safety; is there a need to revise or re-model the practices/legislations, reviewing the accidental trends and role of legislation?
• Multilingual safety in construction; reviewing the current industrial practices and the need to improve, highlighting the actual issues of migrant workers in the construction industry
• Analysis of the impact of the latest technology in the construction Industry
• The role of Business Information Modelling (BIM) in the Construction Industry; assessment of practices, management, and productivity through such computer-aided tools
• Procurement techniques; analyses of the most suited procurement strategies in the construction industry
• Is there a need for an integrated model that can replace all other management tools? Review of how the construction industry can be revolutionised through the use of state-of-the-art computer-aided techniques
• Construction Management; highlighting the best practices in modern construction projects
• Zero carbon structures; use of technology to develop zero-carbon buildings
• Waste minimisation in construction projects; identifying the best practices
• Use of Waste in construction; how demolition can be modelled to construct new structures
• Construction materials analyses; timber, steel, or concrete? Investigation of materials for optimum material utilisation.
• Design of Effective ventilation systems in high-rise buildings
• How Is Building Information Modeling (BIM) Transforming Construction Project Delivery?
• Is Prefabricated Construction A Sustainable Solution for Affordable Housing?
• The Role of Virtual Reality (VR) in Construction Design and Training
• Can drones be used in construction to increase transparency and traceability?
• The Impact of Brexit on Construction Material Supply Chains and Costs
• The Impact of big data analysis in prediction in the construction industry 
• The Impact of Autonomous Vehicles on Construction Logistics and Transportation
• The Role of Community Engagement in Large-Scale Construction Projects
• The Challenges and Opportunities of High-Performance Buildings

COVID-19 Civil Engineering Research Topics

Construction engineering after coronavirus: identify the consequences of covid-19 on construction engineering in the uk or any country of your choice..

Research Aim: This research will focus on identifying the impacts of Coronavirus on construction engineering in the selected country.

Research to study the damage caused to the construction projects due to the lack of workers on site.

Research Aim: This study will focus on identifying the damage caused to construction projects as the workers are staying away from the sites. What measures are taken to complete these projects and recover the loss?

Contractors and Builders after COVID-19: business industry, tender opportunities, and planning to continue business.

Research Aim: This research aims to identify the conditions faced by contractors and builders. What is their plan to deal with the COVID-19 crisis? How did it affect the business industry and tender opportunities?

Cite Operating Procedures: research the various safety measures for workers, contractors, and engineers working on construction sites.

Research Aim: This research is conducted to know about various safety measures taken by the government and private organisations for workers, contractors, and engineers working on construction sites.

Investigate how civil engineers are working from home: Identify whether remote working can be a long-lasting solution to recover the loss caused by COVID-19.

Research Aim: Remote working has emerged as a ray of hope for mechanical engineers amid this pandemic. This research will focus on the advantages and disadvantages of remote working and also answer the question of whether it is a long-lasting solution or not.

Research to study the economic and labour crisis as a result of Coronavirus.

Research Aim: This research will focus on the financial loss and labour crisis caused by the outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic.

Research to study the disruption of the supply chain, shortage of contractors, workers, and material, and cancellation of contracts due to COVID-19

Research Aim: This research will focus on identifying the disruption of the supply chain, shortage of contractors, workers, and materials, and cancellation of contracts due to COVID-19.

Research to throw light on the future of the construction Industry after the Coronavirus pandemic.

Research Aim: This research will predict how the construction industry will transform after the COVID-19 pandemic. What challenges it may face, and what could be the possible ways to meet those challenges?

Also Read:   Mechanical Engineering Dissertation Topics

Note: Some of these topics may require students to undertake primary research, which includes developing questionnaires, survey forms, and interviews, whilst others are based on desk-based research.

How Can ResearchProspect Help?

ResearchProspect writers can send several custom topic ideas to your email address. Once you have chosen a topic that suits your needs and interests, you can order for our dissertation outline service , which will include a brief introduction to the topic, research questions , literature review , methodology , expected results , and conclusion . The dissertation outline will enable you to review the quality of our work before placing the order for our full dissertation writing service !

Important Notes

As a construction engineering student looking to get good grades, it is essential to develop new ideas and experiment with existing construction engineering theories – i.e., to add value and interest to your research topic.

The field of construction engineering is vast and interrelated to so many other academic disciplines like  civil engineering , chemical engineering , mechanical engineering , engineering and more. That is why it is imperative to create a construction engineering dissertation topic that is particular and sound and actually solves a practical problem that may be rampant in the field.

We can’t stress how important it is to develop a logical research topic; it is the basis of your entire research. There are several significant downfalls to getting your topic wrong: your supervisor may not be interested in working on it, the topic has no academic creditability, the research may not make logical sense, and there is a possibility that the study is not viable.

This impacts your time and efforts in  writing your dissertation , as you may end up in a cycle of rejection at the very initial stage of the dissertation. That is why we recommend reviewing existing research to develop a topic, taking advice from your supervisor, and even asking for help in this particular stage of your dissertation.

While developing a research topic, keeping our advice in mind will allow you to pick one of the best construction engineering dissertation topics that fulfil your requirement of writing a research paper and add to the body of knowledge.

Therefore, it is recommended that when finalising your dissertation topic, you read recently published literature to identify gaps in the research that you may help fill.

Remember- dissertation topics need to be unique, solve an identified problem, be logical, and be practically implemented. Take a look at some of our sample construction engineering dissertation topics to get an idea for your own dissertation.

How to Structure Your Dissertation on Construction Engineering

A well-structured   dissertation can help students   to achieve a high overall academic grade.

• A Title Page
• Acknowledgements
• Declaration
• Abstract: A summary of the research completed
• Table of Contents
• Introduction : This chapter includes the project rationale, research background, key research aims and objectives, and the research problems. An outline of the structure of a dissertation can also be added to this chapter.
• Literature Review :  This chapter presents relevant theories and frameworks by analysing published and unpublished literature available on the chosen research topic in light of the research questions to be addressed. The purpose is to highlight and discuss the relative weaknesses and strengths of the selected research area whilst identifying any research gaps. Break down of the topic, and key terms can positively impact your dissertation and your tutor.
• Methodology: The  data collection  and  analysis methods and techniques employed by the researcher are presented in the Methodology chapter, which usually includes  research design, research philosophy, research limitations, code of conduct, ethical consideration, data collection methods, and  data analysis strategy .
• Findings and Analysis: Findings of the research are analysed in detail under the Findings and Analysis chapter. All key findings/results are outlined in this chapter without interpreting the data or drawing any conclusions. It can be useful to include  graphs , charts, and   tables in this chapter to identify meaningful trends and relationships.
• Discussion and  Conclusion: The researcher presents his interpretation of the results in this chapter and states whether the research hypothesis has been verified or not. An essential aspect of this section of the paper is to link the results and evidence from the literature. Recommendations with regard to the implications of the findings and directions for the future may also be provided. Finally, a summary of the overall research, along with final judgments, opinions, and comments, must be included in the form of suggestions for improvement.
• References:  This should be completed in accordance with your University’s requirements
• Bibliography
• Appendices: Any additional information, diagrams, and graphs used to complete the  dissertation  but not part of the dissertation should be included in the Appendices chapter. Essentially, the purpose is to expand the information/data.

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ResearchProspect is a  UK based academic writing service that provides help with  Dissertation Proposal Writing ,  PhD Proposal Writing ,  Dissertation Writing ,  Dissertation Editing, and Improvement .

Our team of writers is highly qualified. They are experts in their respective fields. They have been working in the industry for a long time and thus are aware of the issues and trends of the industry they are working in.

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How to find dissertation topics about construction engineering.

For construction engineering dissertation topics:

• Investigate emerging technologies.
• Explore sustainability challenges.
• Analyse project management techniques.
• Consider safety innovations.
• Examine cost-effective practices.
• Consult experts and industry sources.

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Building for Tomorrow: Global Enterprise and the U.S. Construction Industry (1988)

Chapter: 4. research and development in construction.

Below is the uncorrected machine-read text of this chapter, intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text of each book. Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.

4 Research and Development in Construction Research and development (R&D) in construction includes a broad range of activities directed toward improving quality, pro- ductivity, and efficiency of the materials, equipment, labor, and management of construction. The value of R&D activities is well accepted as means for improving productivity and generating new ideas in electronics, telecommunications, genetic engineering, and other technical fields. The linkages between construction research and application, however, have been more difficult to document, de- spite advances made during the twentieth century in new equipment and materials, largely because of the great number of mostly small- scaTe builders and equipment and materials producers. For this same reason, the construction industry has greater difficulty mobilizing resources needed to support substantial research programs. As a result, the committee observed several troubling trends: . Other countries appear to be putting more effort than the United States into construction R&D; . Other countries are working hard to improve the "hardware" of construction by improving construction methods and developing technology for automation (including robotics); . A more innovative environment exists in most foreign firms because R&D has been integrated into overall operations; 55

56 BUILDING FOR TOMORRO W . Other countries are willing to back longer-range research ef- forts through the slow but methodical methods needed; ~ R&D in other countries tends to be proprietary to the com- pany sponsoring it, leading to some duplication but increasing com- mercial rewards for success; . Vertical integration within large foreign construction firms has made easier the utilization of research results by the operating units of their companies; . There is less emphasis on research related to the "manage- ment" of construction by firms in other countries, since they tend to acquire these technologies through joint ventures with American firms or by sending their young professionals to U.S. universities for training. U.S. CONSTRUCTION RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT Accurate appraisals of R&D investments in the U.S. design and construction industries are stubbornly elusive. Available statistics are scarce and often recorded in a manner that can be misleading. In another study* done by the Building Research Board the following observations were made on R&D expenditures in the U.S. design and construction industries: . Construction contractors (both general and specialty)-$54 million . $838 million million Manufacturers of construction materials and equipment Federal agencies (both consumers and nonconsumers) $200 All other sectors (based on estimate) $111 million Total annual construction-related R&D $1,223 million Based on a total volume of construction of some $312 billion in 1984, these estimates represent about 0.4 percent of sales invested in R&D, far less than other mature industries such as appliances at 1.4 percent, automobiles at 1.7 percent, or textiles at 0.8 percent. (This expenditure level is also well below Japanese construction R&D expenditure rates.) U.S. contractors, architects, end engineersinvest less than 0.05 percent in R&D as a group, a fraction of the amount they spend on liability insurance alone. ~ Construction Productivity' National Academy Press, Washington, D.C., 1986.

RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT IN CONS TR ACTION 57 Both lack of resources and competing priorities are factors in this low level of R&D expenditure. Faced with intense price compe- tition, many designers and constructors find it difficult to appropriate substantial resources for R&D. Tax regulations that may require cap- italization of R&D expenditures increase the demands R&D would make on current cash flows. The natural aversion to risk of many businessmen makes R&D spending that may yield no immediate commercial benefit more difficult to justify even when business is good, and easy to cut when times are bad. Not one of the many nedium and small firms can afford a meaningful research program, and there are few mechanisms to facilitate joint funding of research that will yield distinct benefits to the participating firms. What the optimum level of U.S. construction R&D spending ought to be is a complex question for which the committee found no ready answer. Observation of U.S. performance in introducing technological innovation and an eroding competitive position make it apparent that the level of spending viewed either as an investment for increased productivity or as an indication of openness to new ideas is too low. Direct government involvement in construction research is lim- ited but significant: . The National Science Foundation (NSF) has been a principal source of support for university-based research activities for the U.S. design and construction industries. Through the NSF, National En- gineering Research Centers are being established, such as the Center for Advanced Technology for Large Structural Systems (ATESS) at Lehigh University. In addition to NSF funds of $10.4 million over a five-year period, other state-related institutions and the private sector are providing matching funds. The major goal of the ATESS center is to do research and develop technology benefitting U.S. structures-related industries in design, fabrication, and construction, and inspection and protection of structures in service. The federal government laboratories such as the Army's Con- struction Engineering Research Laboratory (CERL), the Navy's Port Hueneme Civil Engineering Laboratory, the Tyndall Air Force En- gineering and Services Research Center, and the National Bureau of Standards' Centers for Building Technology and Fire Research conduct research on a diverse range of topics with military and civil applications.

58 BUILDING FOR TOMORROW ~ Grants from the Army Corps of Engineers have produced ma- jor new research programs at the Massachusetts Institute of Tech- nology and the University of Illinois. The Construction Industry Institute at the University of Texas at Austin is an outstanding example of research without direct gov- ernment support. More than 65 organizations representing owners, contractors, and 25 academic institutions have combined their re- sources to tackle advanced construction research. The institute then represents an important model for broader public-private partnership in construction research. OTHER EFFORTS NEEDED An exarn~nation of research ideas for addressing societal needs, undertaken by the Technical Council on Research of the American Society of Citric Engineers in 1979, indicates a long list of research suggestions, most oriented toward improving the methodology of engineering. The list includes a large number of projects related to improving methodology, many of which could be valuable in the international arena.* The architectural research community is based almost exclu- sively in universities, so that the potential exists for linking such research to teaching programs. The civil engineering research com- munity is also largely based in universities, but there is some me- chanical, electrical, or electronic research of direct relevance to the construction sectors being done by these other departments. To a limited extent both architectural and civil engineering research in- stitutions do projects related to mechanical and electrical systems. Most research institutions have projects tied to computer-based de- sign and engineering, but more work is needed, particularly to bring new results into practice, through teaching and professional outreach programs. While spending on research often exceeds U.S. rates, the work going on in construction sector research programs in other coun- tries tends to mirror programs in U.S. universities and government laboratories, with three major exceptions: *Addrc`sing Societal Needs of the 1980's Through Civil Engineering Research, The American Society of Civil Engineers, New York, New York, 1979.

RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT IN CONSTRUCTION 59 . The work supported by the Swedish government on behalf of the building industry tends to be much more people-oriented, describing user requirements and how these requirements should be accommodated in design. However, there does not appear to be any better match between the research programs and the teaching programs in the universities than in the United States. . The Soviet Union has six major research units within its con- struction agency Gosstroy. Five of these units do traditional science and engineering research of the type done in government building laboratories around the world, but one research unit concentrates on "cybernetics." Not much is known about the work of this unit, but it potentially could represent an interesting area for collaboration. With their government's strong encouragement, the six large, integrated Japanese construction companies all support research by internal units. These programs include hundreds of people, excellent facilities, and a broad spectrum of subjects (see box). This committee has not undertaken to recommend a complete agenda for research in construction and design, and planning of such an agenda by a single centralized body would in any case be unproductive. However, committee members feelthat certain types of research are clearly needed, such as these two examples: 1. The general subject of "diagnostics" is talked about within the architectural research community as an area for methodological improvement. Work on this subject could be greatly enhanced if uni- versity researchers and practicing architects worked in parallel with firms that are in the business of designing and marketing diagnostic instruments. A program that provides special funds to research units (as contrasted with individuals) within universities that had already obtained an agreement for matching funds from instrument compa- nies would encourage vertical integration between the architectural sector and the equipment-producing sector. 2. The development of safety methods for structures during the construction phase could benefit from case studies. For example, the NBS Center for Building Technology has just completed a study of the collapse of L'Ambiance Plaza in Bridgeport, Connecticut, a building which was being constructed using the lift-slab method. This collapse could serve as a case study for a structural engineering faculty to develop a continuing education course for engineers in practice, thus providing a link among a federal laboratory, university research, and professionals. While this subject is unique and timely,

60 BUILDING FOR TOMORRO W

RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT IN CONSTRUCTION 61 _ ~--- ~ ~' ~--~ - _ _ the concept is to have this work serve as a model for similar projects on a range of structural safety problems and solutions. As will be discussed further in Chapter 6, the development of advanced concepts for infrastructure poses an international challenge of enormous proportions. The present practice of dealing with urban transportation, water and energy supplies, waste management, and communications is based on inventions developecI nearly a century ago. In the largest cities of the world these old inventions are clearly not well suited to dealing with present problems, and in the small communities of the developing world there has always been a kind of hand-me-down, makeshift quality to the nature of infrastructure investments. New technology for infrastructure could possibly help the United States avoid the endless cutting and patching of our lO~year-old sys- tems, and could also provide whole new market opportunities in the international sphere. There should be special programs to concen- trate on infrastructure development within the university research community. These programs should encourage university units that are skilled in the areas of the "emerging technologies" to explore ways of creating new or higher-performing systems for infrastruc- ture. Technologies such as new ceramics, advanced microelectronics, biotechnology, and genetic engineering should be incorporated into joint programs with the architectural and civil engineering faculties, and especially to provide graduate students from these technological areas the opportunities to work on infrastructure. In such programs universities could associate with trade and professional groups, such as the American Public Works Association, to introduce engineers in practice to new technologies and their capability. The committee recognizes that some engineering schools can best be encouraged to expend research and teaching in construction by

62 BUILDING FOR TOMORROW evidence of employment interest for their graduates. Programs may be needed to link employers with graduate programs in construction by having the university offer special graduate programs for mature employees of professional firms. As the Japanese mode! illustrates, university-based activity is not the only way that construction R&D can be accomplished, but in the United States, academic institutions have become the primary centers of research. This pattern is unlikely to change in the fore- seeable future, nor is it clear that it ought to change. What is clear to the committee, however, is that better mechanisms for linking research to construction practice are needed. There is a need as well to increase the speed with which ideas from one field of research are tested for their value in other fields, and with which ideas of value enter practice. The case of the Bell Laboratories (Case Study 4), drawn from an industrial situation very different from construction, is nevertheless instructive because of their great success in linking research to the market. In construc- tion, where the market is distributed among so many suppliers and buyers, projects built with federal government funds can be used to demonstrate new technology. A good example is the introduction to U.S. transit construction of precast concrete segmental tunnel liners (see Chapter 6~. The U.S. Department of Commerce has noted, "Over the next twenty years it is totally reasonable to expect that we will see widespread application of the following technologies: advanced mate- rials, microelectronics, automation, biotechnology, computing, mem- brane technology, superconductivity, and lasers."* Today and in the near future many other new technologies may be added to the list. Mechanisms are needed to expose these new technologies and con- struction to one another, and to produce design and construction professionals competent to make the connections required for inns vation. Besides institutional research, there must be training and education. *Effect of Structural Change in the U.S. Economy on the Uric of Public Works Scr~nccs, U.S. Department of Commerce, Washington, D.C., 1987.

RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT IN CONSTRUCTION CASE STUDY 4: THE BELL TELEPHONE LABORATORIES 63 The invention of the telephone is perhaps the single best modern example of how new technology can alter building and infrastructure. The BeR Teieph one Laboratories have for more than 60 years been one of the leading U.S. centers of research and innovations that have changed how to design and build individual structures en c] cities, as weR as the more basic structure of the economy and society. The committee recognizes that the Be]] Labs are a product of a private sector monopoly company that had vertical integration and an ability to make elective decisions about resource allocation and management strategy, with greater ease than is the case in U.S. design and construction. Nevertheless, many characteristics of the Bed Labs can serve as a useful mode] for institutional arrangements needed to strengthen U.S. building research. It is instructive to look at the history and accomp~ishmeIIts of this organization: The invention of the telephone was not inspired by a pre-existent popular demand. Rather, it came about largely through the ingenuity and vision of one man Alexander Graham Bell. His belief that there was a great potential need for two-way voice communication over a distance, a need of which few men had been conscious, was confirmed by its immediate success and spectacular growth in spite of early technical limitations. By the end of the first fifty years a great new industry had been developed. There were nearly seventeen million telephones in the United States, almost twelve million of them in the Bell System. And in perhaps no other field had the force of scientific research in support of engineering development been so effectively demonstrated.* As the AT&T Company Annual report for 1913 said: At the beginning of the telephone industry there was no art of electrical engineering nor was there any school or university conferring the degree of electrical engineer. Notwithstanding this the general engineering staR was soon organized, calling to their aid some of the most distinguished professors of science in our universities. As problems became more formidable and increased in number and complexity, the engineering and scientific staff was increased in size and in its specialization so that we now (1913) have working at headquarters on the problems of the associated companies some 550 engineers and scientists carefully selected with due regard to the practical as well as the scientific nature of the problems encountered. *A History of Engined ring and Scicnec in the Bail System, Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey, 1975.

64 BUILDING FOR TOMORRO W It can be said that this company has created the entire art of telephony and that almost without exception none of the important contributions to the art has been made by any government telephone administration or by any other telephone company either in this country or abroad. By 1924 the technical programs of the Bell System had so grown in range and intensity, and in number of personnel, as to suggest formation of a single new organization to handle most or all of these activities. Such an organization was formed on December 27, 1924, and started operations on January 1, 1925, under the name of Bell Telephone Laboratories, Incorporated. This corporation had a dual responsibility- to the AT&T Company for fundamental researches and to the Western Electric Company for the embodiment of the results of these researches in designs suitable for manufacture. At the date of incorporation, the personnel numbered approximately 3,600, of whom about 2,000 were members of the technical staff, made up of engineers, physicists, chemists, metallurgists and experts in various fields of technical endeavor.... Technological innovation had formed the indispensable core for telephony's growth up to 1925, but was even more significant to the future because so much of it was fundamental: the way was being prepared for more powerful systems yet to come, which would be essential to the enormous expansion felt to be lying ahead. Perhaps more significantly, the application of scientific methods to solving the "system" problems of telephony set a pattern that influenced industrial research and development by demonstrating the power of these methods and developing techniques of management that encouraged their use. Backing up the work on systems, which had laid the groundwork for so much that was yet needed, were the successful management techniques which had been developed for conducting and applying research, the means for closely controlling the quality of manufactured product, and a type of organization providing close integration of the user, technical developer, and manufacturer. The Bell Labs have produced the transistor, the laser, the solar cell, and the first communications satellite, as we]] as sound motion pictures, the science of radio astronomy, en c] crucial evidence for the theory that a Big Bang created the universe. While they are a private laboratory (in the distinction made in the United States between government and private research work), their fin ancia] support was largely generates' from a kind of tax on every telephone in the United States (before the breakup of AT&T in 1984), which in turn was a]]owec! by their rate examiners (a public institution designed to monitor a monopoly utility). The potential for direct emulation by a government/industry research center is limited, therefore, but the operating principle of striving for increased systems performance by

RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT IN CONSTRUCTION 65 teams of scientists, engineers, manufacturers, en c] systems operators is a good one. Today's telephone caller uses components Bell never dreamed of, today's driver depends on systems Daimler and Benz never thought of, and today's homeowner switches on a power and light system that Edison never envisioned. These discoveries have long since been em- bedded in mammoth networks of technology that no single individual invented. Technological systems evolve through relatively small steps mark- ed by the occasional stubborn obstacle and by countless break- throughs. Often the breakthroughs are labeled inventions and patent- ed, but more often they are social innovations made by persons soon forgotten. In the early days of a system such as electric light and power, inventors played the prominent role. Then as the system ma- tured and expanded to urban and regional networks, others came to the fore. Electric light and power systems today are not just scaled-up versions of the Pearl Street station that Edison introduced in New York City in 1882. By the turn of the century, for example, it was the utility manager, not the inventor or engineer, who played the major role in extending round-the-clock service to many different kinds of customers to the night shift chemical plant as well as the rush-hour electric streetcars.* *Thomas P. Hughes, The inventive continuum, Science 84, November 1984.

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Home » Blog » Dissertation » Topics » Construction » Construction Dissertation Topics (26 Examples) For Research

Construction Dissertation Topics (26 Examples) For Research

Mark Jun 12, 2020 Jun 12, 2020 Construction No Comments

If you are looking for some highly interesting construction dissertation topics, you have visited the right place. Here, you can find a range of construction dissertation topics and project topics on construction. Along with the list of construction dissertation topics and research topics on construction, we also help in formulating your objectives, proposal, literature review, […]

If you are looking for some highly interesting construction dissertation topics, you have visited the right place. Here, you can find a range of construction research topics for your research project.

Along with the list of construction dissertation topics and research topics on construction, we also help in formulating your objectives, proposal, literature review, methodology, and analysis. You can also explore the list of building surveying dissertation topics to get more ideas for your dissertation topics.

List of Construction dissertation topics

Exploring a forward-thinking solution to the housing crisis in Australia by evaluating the modern methods of construction..

A study of innovative solutions in the construction industry reviewing the events and trends of 2014 to 2018.

Exploring the driving factors of construction industrialisation development in the developing countries.

An evaluation of the traditional methods for maintenance of mud houses to promote environmental sustainability in Nigeria.

Analysing the solution for future designs using techniques from vernacular architecture in developing countries.

Investigating and identifying the key indicators for sustainable construction materials.

An analysis of user criteria in the context of sustainability of modern methods of construction based on wood.

A literature review on dilemmas faced by the architects and designers related to the paradigms of sustainable development.

The importance of materials management in construction – an exploratory study.

A comparative analysis of the modern practices in project management of engineering and construction projects in the UK.

A review of some of the factors leading to construction project delays.

Exploring government construction projects in Australia and finding ways to improve the construction contract management.

The study of virtual information modelling acceptance based on project management knowledge areas.

Analysing the importance of cost management in construction projects.

Evaluating the effects of cost overrun in construction projects.

Studying the importance of construction health and safety management and its impact on the success of construction projects.

Reviewing the simulating uncertainties in the construction projects.

Analysing the new measures of circular economy thinking in construction companies.

Investigating the losses and productivity parameters in construction projects.

Studying the recent trends related to construction automation.

A study on the green tunnel construction technology and application.

An analysis of the construction technology of roof steel structure in developing countries.

How is technology shaping the future of the construction industry around the world?

What are the political and economic risks in international construction projects?

An evolution of the modular construction industry growth and its impact on the built environment.

Analysing the impact of IT technology convergence innovation on the performance of construction projects.

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Construction Research

Construction research at Oregon State focuses on a wide variety of topics related to the design and construction of infrastructure projects. Construction faculty have extensive expertise and experience in the following signature research areas:

• Human Factors in Construction – addressing the needs and abilities of humans involved in the construction process
• Advanced Methods and Materials – efficient use of materials, equipment, and labor to optimize construction operations and project success
• Virtual Design and Construction – utilizing technology to plan, manage, maintain, visualize, and simulate the project design and construction process
• Management Science – scientific investigation and understanding of the project delivery and management process

Construction faculty lead and participate in research sponsored by a variety of local, regional, and national organizations including the National Science Foundation (NSF), Construction Industry Institute (CII), National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP), Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT), Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), Center for Construction Research and Training (CPWR), Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), and PacTrans.

Construction faculty and research interests: 

Ingrid Arocho

Assistant professor of construction engineering: Research interests include construction equipment fleet management, pollution production during construction activities, and construction methods improvement to reduce environmental impact.  Her previous research included the estimation and forecasting of pollution emissions from construction equipment fleets. Dr. Arocho’s teaching interests include cost estimating, project management for construction projects, and advanced topics in project controls.

Joseph Fradella III

Senior instructor II: Extensive industry experience both nationally and internationally, with particular focus on historic building restoration and conservation, retaining walls and hardscape work, and other building renovation and maintenance projects. During his career he has worked for several engineering and construction firms, primarily focusing on mechanical and electrical systems. Mr. Fradella’s teaching interests include mechanical and electrical construction, cost estimating, planning and scheduling, project management, and professional development.

John Gambatese, P.E. (CA)

Professor of construction engineering: Technical and research interests include construction safety, work zone design, constructability, sustainability, design-construction interface, temporary construction structures, construction site operations, and systems engineering.  Current and recent research projects address issues related to construction worker health and safety, design of construction and maintenance work zones, Prevention through Design (PtD), formwork risk and reliability, and the impacts of lean design and construction on safety. Dr. Gambatese’s teaching interests include designing for safety, construction site systems, temporary construction structures, planning and scheduling, and construction contracts and specifications.

Joseph Louis

Assistant professor of construction engineering and Robert C. Wilson Faculty Scholar: Research interests lie at the intersection of simulation, visualization, and automation within the context of construction operations. He draws upon concepts in these areas to provide construction managers with better means of planning, monitoring, and controlling their operations to improve safety, maximize productivities, and minimize equipment idle times. Dr. Louis’s teaching interests include undergraduate and graduate classes in heavy civil operations and equipment, and analytical techniques for construction encompassing construction simulation, visualization, and risk management.

Catarina Pestana

Instructor: Research interests lie the area of project management, including lean management and risk management. Her research interests focus on the enhancement of the performance of production systems and products in different stages of their life-cycle and supply chain in the AEC industry. Current research addresses multi-criteria risk-based decision methodologies to identify and validate improvements to processes and on-site operations in the AEC industry. Dr. Pestana’s teaching interests include scheduling and planning, construction contracts, heavy civil, building construction, and lean construction courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels.  As an academic, who has spent years in the field, Dr. Pestana creates conditions for students to learn, bringing real world problems to the classroom and guiding students to organize information in a personally meaningful way, helping them grow and prepare for their career ahead.

Yelda Turkan

Assistant professor of construction engineering: Research interests are centered on the areas of remote sensing, automation, and information technology applications for construction engineering and management, infrastructure asset management, and transportation. Her recent research projects have focused on building information modeling (BIM) for visualization and facility energy management; bridge information modeling (BrIM) for bridge inspections; and investigating how 3D laser scanning, and virtual design and construction (VDC) technologies can help improve project controls. Dr. Turkan’s teaching interests include virtual design and construction, engineering planning, project management in construction, planning and scheduling, and construction contracts and specifications.

Construction Graduate Program Alumni

Following their time at Oregon State, our students are often recruited by leaders in academia, government, and industry in order to make a positive impact around the globe. Here are a few of our recent graduates and their current positions:

• Serey Raksa Moeung, Staff Engineer, Civil West Engineering Services, Inc. (MS, 2022)
• Ziyu Jin, Assistant Professor, Colorado State University, (PhD, 2021)
• Ola Al-Saffar, Baghdad, Iraq (MS, 2020)
• Ali Karakhan, Faculty Member, University of Baghdad, Iraq (PhD, 2020)
• Mohammed Azeez, Baghdad Governorate, Iraq (PhD, 2020)
• Ding Liu, Lecturer, Qingdao Technical University, China (PhD, 2019)
• Chukwuma (Chuma) Nnaji, Assistant Professor, Texas A&M University (PhD, 2018)
• Kasim AlOmari, Associate Professor, University of Thi-Qar, Iraq (PhD, 2017)

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The importance of research in construction

The construction industry has an established history of research focusing on project design, planning and execution. While this work has advanced and improved the industry, in recent years the role of the craft professional has emerged as another topic of study. This type of research blends traditional construction research methods with human research methods from the social sciences.

This area of research can have a major influence on the business of construction. It provides a great opportunity to improve company performance and change the lives of individuals across the industry. It can also help show industry leaders and decision makers where we are, where we're going and what threats or opportunities there may be out there. 

At the National Center for Construction Education and Research (NCCER) , we believe research is important enough to include in our name. The research our organization conducts helps guide us in our mission to develop a safe, productive and sustainable workforce. 

Here are some of the ways research provides benefits for the construction industry.

Research helps set industry benchmarks

Basic research is important to set year-to-year data benchmarks for the construction industry. Some examples of these types of numbers include the amount of active construction companies, the number of people employed by the industry  and the monetary value of the projects being worked on.

Having these basic facts available for reference helps us understand the size and scale of the industry as it currently stands. It’s also useful to compare data to previous years. By having the same data recorded for multiple years, you can discover trends and make predictions. Is the industry growing, or is it downsizing? What are some events on the timeline that may be affecting those figures? What can we expect future years to look like, and how can we best prepare for them?

Research helps the industry understand the workforce shortage

It’s no secret the construction industry has long been facing a shortage of skilled professionals. Doing research and gathering relevant information about the causes of the skills gap and the resulting symptoms helps us understand the situation and develop appropriate solutions.

One example of a revealing statistic is the average age of a construction craft professional. The average construction worker is 42.9 years old , compared to the average age of a U.S. citizen of 38.5 years old. This indicates that most craft professionals tend to be older – with many nearing retirement age – and there are not enough younger entrants into the industry to offset or balance this aging workforce.

The workforce shortage is a complex issue with numerous factors. Research helps to outline those factors, and analysis can provide prescriptions for efforts to make a difference. 

Research helps the industry with recruiting and marketing

While research can reveal some areas of needed improvement, it can also showcase the ways the industry is succeeding and excelling. In the ongoing efforts to recruit new talent into the skilled trades, it can be effective to highlight these positive statistics.

In a recent study, NCCER found the average base salaries for construction careers continues to rise. Research also indicates that people working in the construction industry have a higher rate of job satisfaction than other industries do. 

Data like this can be used in marketing efforts by construction companies and training organizations to attract individuals to the industry. Combining anecdotal or testimonial content about the benefits of working in construction with true research that backs up those statements creates a more well-rounded and persuasive campaign.

Construction research from NCCER

How can research and data benefit your construction business? 

Visit NCCER’s research page to check out our studies and analysis about the construction industry, workforce development and construction education.

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Editors' picks

Tutor Perini sees ‘major project opportunities,’ but settlement drags down profits

The heavy civil contractor says demand for megaprojects is high, but disputes continue to make them risky business.

Photo illustration: Shaun Lucas/Industry Dive; Getty Images; OSHA

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• August 2024 wins: Contractors report their latest awards By Construction Dive Staff
• Dycom buys Black & Veatch’s wireless infrastructure construction biz By Julie Strupp
• Gilbane taps Lendlease safety vet for global position By Matthew Thibault
• Data centers, water, infrastructure fuel public firms’ profits By Construction Dive Staff

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Feature papers represent the most advanced research with significant potential for high impact in the field. A Feature Paper should be a substantial original Article that involves several techniques or approaches, provides an outlook for future research directions and describes possible research applications.

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Innovative Construction and Building Materials

Recent research in construction and building materials has focused on the development and characterization of innovative materials to improve the quality of the overall infrastructure and lower the environmental impact. This leads to environmentally friendly (and sustainable) processes and circular economy.

Physicochemical studies have facilitated the recognition, definition, and assessment of several initiatives in this regard, leading to the identification of technologies, techniques, materials, and approaches with several benefits for the construction industry and its processes.

It is our pleasure to invite you to submit papers for this Topic on “Innovative Construction and Building Materials”. Papers describing experimental results, applying techniques, and proposing models and analytical approaches for developments in the field of construction and building materials, as well as reviews, opinions, commentaries, and comments and reports, are welcome.

Research topics include but are not limited to:

• Functional innovative materials;
• Sustainable processes;
• Composites;
• New materials from wastes;
• Synthesis of novel materials;
• Characterization techniques;
• New aspects in constructions and building materials.

We look forward to receiving your contributions to this Topic which will provide an overview of the high-quality research going on in the physico-chemistry (synthesis and development) of innovative materials for application in the construction industry.

Prof. Dr. Cesare Oliviero Rossi Dr. Pietro Calandra Dr. Paolino Caputo Prof. Dr. Bagdat Teltayev Dr. Valeria Loise Dr. Michele Porto Topic Editors

• additive manufacturing and technology
• polymer science
• process optimization
• road pavements
• biomaterials
• circular economy
• waste optimization and recycling
• material synthesis
• alternative binders
• emulsions and emulsifiers
• minerals and aggregates
• material characterization
• generative design

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Construction Technology Research Paper Topics

This list of construction technology research paper topics  provides the list of 18 potential topics for research papers and an overview article on the history of construction technology.

1. Building Acoustics

An important element in a properly functioning building is correct building acoustics. Achieving a low level of background noise in a classroom, for example, will ensure that the teacher’s voice is audible; the sounds of an orchestra will be optimal in a concert hall with proper acoustics. The systematic study of room acoustics began at the end of the nineteenth century, and consequently a scientific understanding of building acoustic design is almost entirely a twentieth century phenomenon.

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The means to achieve low noise levels in buildings were developed during the twentieth century. One of the greatest differences between old and new auditoriums is the low noise levels achieved in those built from the mid-twentieth century onward. Noise from external sources can enter a room through vibration paths (structure-borne transmission) or can pass directly into the building through adjacent walls (airborne transmission). Where very low noise or vibration levels are needed in auditoriums, recording studios, and operating theaters, vibration isolation (springs and resilient materials) are used, as are physical breaks in vibration paths. Airborne noise is reduced by the use of constructions such as double partitions separated by air gaps containing absorbent materials. The failure to achieve the desired background noise levels is often due simply to poor workmanship.

The biggest influence that electronics has had on building acoustics has been the computer. Sophisticated computer-based instrumentation has allowed accurate measurement of building acoustics. Computer-based prediction models have enabled the improved understanding and design of acoustic technologies, from building elements to the whole rooms. Much of the mathematics used by acoustic engineers was developed in the nineteenth century, but this has only been exploitable at the end of the twentieth century using computers. There was also increased interest in virtual acoustic prototypes, which would allow building acoustics to be listened to in virtual environments, allowing nonacoustic experts to more readily understand the principles of good acoustic design.

2. Building Designs for Energy Conservation

In most countries in the twentieth century, the energy consumed in buildings represented a substantial proportion of nationwide energy consumption. In higher latitude regions, the majority of this energy demand has historically been energy for homes to provide space heating, followed by energy for hot water, for powering appliances, and for lighting. In nondomestic buildings in these regions the demand has historically been dominated by electricity for lighting, appliances, and ventilation and cooling. While space and water heating can be the largest proportion of household energy consumption, electricity consumption can be as important in terms of upstream CO2 emissions if it is generated in a fossil fuel electricity generating station. Architects, builders, and engineers have struggled to balance the demand for energy, particularly in the industrialized countries that are heavily energy dependent, with environmental and cost concerns. The oil crisis of 1973, following an embargo of oil directed primarily against the U.S. by Middle Eastern oil-producing companies, and the OPEC oil crisis of 1979 was the end of the era of cheap energy. Energy conservation emerged as a concern for both designers and consumers, particularly in countries solely dependent on imported oil. The government in Korea, for example, asked people to ‘‘think poor,’’ reduced the number and size of electric light bulbs in government and corporate buildings, and discouraged the use of elevators, air conditioning, and street lighting. Later policies supported use and development of energy conservation technologies. In the U.S. and also in Japan, large-scale research and development funding resulted in building guidelines and technologies for energy conservation.

3. Concrete Bridges

A complex interplay between societal change, the development of the internal combustion engine, and the impact of World War I, led to an explosion in the number of road vehicles in the immediate postwar years—and a totally inadequate nineteenth century legacy of roads to accommodate them. Following the first International Road Congress in 1923, vast and expensive road-building programs were undertaken in the U.S. and Europe, particularly in Germany, during the 1930s. After World War II highway construction continued to grow in an attempt to keep pace with the popularity of the car for private transport. Concrete—strong in compression but weak in tension—is not particularly satisfactory as a running surface. It can easily crack, unlike tarmac, though in the 1960s its use as a surface did become widespread. Otherwise, however, concrete became omnipresent in twentieth century road construction, and in the myriad of bridges, large and small, associated with highway networks.

4. Concrete Shells

Of all the developments in the structural engineering of buildings in the last century, the concrete shell was surely the most spectacular. It provided the means of covering vast areas with a shell of reinforced concrete just a few centimeters thick. Like most developments in building engineering, the origins of shell structures have many strands. Roman engineers constructed domes and barrel vault roofs made of brick or concrete spanning of up to 40 meters, but these were relatively thick— over a meter at their thinnest part. In Gothic cathedrals, at up to 20 meters, spans were more modest but they were often much thinner—as little as 200 millimeters. There were also vernacular precedents, most prominently the thin tile vaults widely used in Catalonia from the seventeenth century which, made using quick-setting gypsum mortar, had the advantage that they could be built without the need for a supporting structure during construction. The idea was exported to the U.S. and patented in the late nineteenth century by Guastavino who used them in many hundreds of buildings, including a spectacular roof at the Pennsylvania Railway station.

5. Construction Equipment

Although the focus of much twentieth century construction work was on road building, there was foundation work for buildings of all sizes, as well as civil engineering projects such as dams. The horse-drawn graders and scrapers used for leveling work on these undertakings during the first decades of the century had changed little from their nineteenth century origins. The first entirely new machine to appear was a tractor, which moved on crawler tracks and was used for towing earthmovers. It evolved from a wheeled, gasoline-powered agricultural tractor designed by Benjamin Holt in 1908 for use on the soft farmland of California.

The hydraulically operated excavator—a descendant of the steam shovel and the succeeding power shovel—was introduced in Germany in 1954. Up to that time, the control functions of power shovels were through cables. The industry’s embrace of the excavator with components roughly analogous to the human arm and hand and a fluidity of movement to match was so thorough that power shovels were no longer used as a construction tool.

Of the many versatile machines developed during the early 1950s, the wheeled loader—also known as a front-end loader, bucket loader, or tractor shovel—was an immediate and widespread success. The nimble and highly maneuverable rubber-tired tractor with front-mounted hydraulically controlled bucket could be used to dig, lift, and quickly fill waiting dump trucks. The versatility and value of these machines increased tremendously in the mid-1950s when JCB in Britain and Case in the U.S. marketed factory-made units in which tractor loaders were joined with the boom, dipperstick, and bucket of the backhoe. The loader or backhoe became the most widely used tool on small-scale building projects.

For thousands of years, dam and water storage technologies have allowed civilizations to flourish in parts of the world where dry climates would otherwise limit human settlement. As early as 3000 BC, civilizations along the Tigris, Euphrates, Ganges, and Nile Rivers constructed earth and stone dams across these large rivers. These structures allowed them to store water for agriculture and create complex societies on that basis.

A dam consists of a mass of earth, timber, rock, concrete, or any combination of these materials that obstructs the flow of water. A dam can either divert water or store it in a reservoir, the artificial body of water that a dam creates. Diversion dams (weirs) raise the elevation of a river and divert water into a canal for transport to a mill, power plant, or irrigated field. Storage dams impound water in a reservoir.

There are three major types of dams—gravity, arch, and buttress. Gravity dams rely for stability on their weight to resist the hydrostatic, or water, pressure exerted by the reservoir. Arch dams, built along arcs that curve upstream into reservoirs, are most commonly found in narrow canyons with hard rock foundations. The arch dam transmits the horizontal water thrust to the abutments. Multiple arch dams consist of a number of single arches supported by buttresses. Like gravity dams, buttress dams rely on gravity for stability, but require less material than standard gravity structures. They resist hydrostatic loads by using the same engineering principles of the flying buttresses that braced the high walls of Gothic cathedrals.

7. Experimental Stress Analysis

This branch of technology deals with the means of measuring strains in materials under load and, from these strains, inferring the stresses actually endured by the material. The fundamental idea underlying the design of all components of structures and machines that must carry loads is that the stress in the material should be less than, or equal to, a certain prescribed level.

Unfortunately, it is not possible to measure stress directly. Stress values inside a material must be calculated using mathematical models of both the structure and properties of the material of which it is made. When fundamental material properties such as strength and stiffness (Young’s modulus) are experimentally tested, the structure is kept very simple—a wire for tests in tension or a supported beam for tests in bending. Measurements of load and the extension or deflection of these structures are then used to calculate internal stresses for simple tension or compression and for simple bending theory in the case of beams. Modern high-speed computers have enabled more complex mathematical models and have rendered complicated structures amenable to theory.

8. Fire Engineering

The term ‘‘fire engineering’’ has gained growing acceptance in the construction industry only since the 1980s. However, the need for buildings that protected both the occupants and the structures themselves in case of fire has existed for 2000 years. Various modeling techniques, together with a full risk analysis of a fire situation, are now collectively called ‘‘fire engineering’’ and represent what has been, perhaps, a quiet revolution in building design. Yet without it, we would not have the dramatic, exposed-steel structures that are now a relatively common sight. The Pompidou Center in Paris, conceived in the early 1970s, was one of the first such buildings (Figure 6). The ability to model the fire load and the structural response to this load allowed the design engineers to adopt the unusual idea of achieving fire resistance by filling the main columns with water which, in a fire, would be pumped around to remove heat from the steel to prevent it heating up too quickly. More common nowadays are the many buildings in which exposed steel can be used in a rather understated way, and the fire engineering approach to design can mean that the need for applied fire protection can be avoided altogether.

9. Long Span and Suspension Bridges

From the beginning of the twentieth century, bridge spans in excess of 300 meters became increasingly common. Depending on considerations of location, use, and loading—not to mention aesthetic and engineering aspiration—these could be suspension, arch, or cantilever structures. When spans of 1000 meters or more began to be contemplated from around 1930 however, a suspension bridge was the only answer. The breakthrough structure was New York’s George Washington Bridge; its clear span of 1067 meters almost doubled that of the previous record-holder, the 564-meter Ambassador Bridge in Detroit completed only two years earlier. Nonetheless, within a few years the leading edge of enterprise had passed to the West Coast, with the simultaneous construction of the San Francisco Bay Bridge complex (twin 704-meter suspension spans plus a tunnel and a cantilever), and the 1280-meterspan Golden Gate Bridge, opened in 1937.

10. Oil Rigs

Although historical accounts exist that describe oil and natural gas drilling techniques in ancient Mesopotamia and China, modern oil rig drilling has its roots primarily in salt-boring technology. By AD 350, China was constructing salt drilling wells that ran as deep as 900 meters into the ground. In the nineteenth century, Europe and the U.S. began importing this salt drilling technology from China. George Bissell, an American entrepreneur, realized that salt-boring techniques could be applied to the drilling for oil. Bissell and other investors hired Edwin Drake to construct and oversee rigs designed for oil drilling. Their venture proved successful when on 27 August 1859, Drake struck oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania.

11. Power Tools and Hand-Held Tools

While the basic hand tools—hammers, saws, planes, and wrenches—used in construction during the twentieth century changed little from those available for generations, there was a revolution in power tools. Developments in power technology led to the mechanization of tools of all types. Coupled with efforts to use new materials that made tools both lighter and more manageable, construction work became more efficient and cost effective.

How tools were used and their impact on the user, led to changes in the design of many handles, grips, and triggers. Concern for the overall weight of tools led to a greater use of plastics and alloys. The distribution of weight within tools led to some overall redesigns in which centers of gravity were repositioned for better balance. The 1990s was a period during which the ergonomics of hand and power tools were scrutinized.

12. Prefabricated Buildings

Prefabricated buildings are assembled from components manufactured in factories. They differ in several ways from ‘‘stick-built’’ structures which are fabricated entirely on site. Typically, prefabricated components are mass produced out of the weather on indoor assembly lines. This method insures that parts can be replicated countless times with little or no variation. Economies of volume reduce costs, and precision measuring and cutting by stationary machine tools lessens waste. As work takes place on assembly lines, it is subject to constant inspection and quality control. Component assemblies made in immovable fixtures and forms further ensure that the finished work is precise and true. Thus, the quality of buildings made from parts fabricated on assembly lines has far greater chance of being accurate and uniform than those made in the field.

13. Reinforced Concrete

Reinforced concrete was in its infancy at the opening of the twentieth century, but it was very quickly adopted worldwide as an economic and versatile construction material. Employing fairly basic materials—sand, crushed stone or gravel, cement, and steel—it found use in all the existing aspects of construction, including buildings, roads, bridges, dams, reservoirs, and docks. It also served the century’s new applications, such as air raid shelters and the pressure vessels of nuclear reactors. By the end of the twentieth century, concrete in its various forms—plain, reinforced, and prestressed— was probably the most widely used construction material in the world.

14. Skyscrapers

Skyscrapers are the world’s tallest buildings. One-hundred-eighty- and 200-meter-high buildings that were considered to be exceptionally tall in 1910 were overshadowed by skyscrapers of more than 300 meters in a matter of 20 years. Advances in construction techniques enabled engineers to build ever-taller structures throughout the twentieth century. However, the principle reasons for erecting exceptionally tall buildings changed little over time. Densely populated cities with escalating land values called for maximum utilization of available space, and tall buildings are one of the most economical means of assembling large numbers of workers in one place. While the majority of skyscrapers were built for the profits they could generate, other reasons included self-aggrandizement, prestige, image, and recognition.

15. Steel Bridges

Though techniques for smelting steel had been known in principle since antiquity, only from the mid-nineteenth century did its large-scale production as a practical structural material become a reality. Stronger than wrought iron and more ductile than cast iron, its superior qualities were exploited in three great steel bridges, each in a different structural system, built between 1870 and 1890. The triple-arch St. Louis Bridge in Missouri, with its two levels for road and rail, the suspension Brooklyn Bridge in New York, and the double-cantilever Forth Rail Bridge in Scotland neatly prefigured the resourcefulness with which twentieth century bridge engineers would continue to exploit the material in long-span structures. With growing understanding of the structural potential of steel, and improvements in its tensile strength and other properties, bridges continued to progressively increase in span.

16. Timber Engineering

Timber engineering is the technology of creating wood products not found in nature. Manufactured lumber has characteristics superior to those found in its individual components. Glued layers of hardwoods or veneers were used for decoration by the ancient Egyptians. The first plywood made from layers of softwood was developed in the early twentieth century. In 1905, the directors of Portland, Oregon’s Lewis & Clark Exposition asked the Portland Manufacturing Company to devise for display some new and unusual wood product. To bring attention to the region’s rich timber resources, the company manufactured the first Douglas fir plywood.

Appeal for the product was immediate and worldwide in scope. Mills everywhere produced thin rectangular sheets of the lightweight wood product. Assembled so that the grain of each ply alternated direction by 90 degrees, it was strong, warp resistant, dimensionally stable, and did not split. It was useful in such applications as door panels, drawer bottoms, crates, trunks, and partitions. If the material had one shortcoming, it was the tendency to delaminate when exposed to dampness. Adhesives were not waterproof and early plywood was limited to interior or protected exterior use.

17. Tunnels and Tunneling

The history of tunnel construction goes back to the ancient civilizations of the Incas, Babylonians, Persians, and Egyptians, and therefore considerable experience in the construction of tunnels had already been gained worldwide by the beginning of the twentieth century. Tunnels were constructed to allow transportation through barriers (mountains, underground or underwater). In a country such as Switzerland or Canada, of which substantial parts are mountainous, tunnels were crucial for the development of a transportation infrastructure, and by the end of the nineteenth century the number of railway tunnels had greatly increased.

The optional methods for constructing tunnels increased in the twentieth century. The development of new methods and the improvement of existing ones were stimulated by the rapid increase of car traffic and the need for roads, for which new tunnels were needed. The choice for a particular way in a certain situation depends on the sort of material through which the tunnel is to be constructed. The most important difference is between hard rock and soft material. Besides that, the length and diameter of the tunnel has an influence on this choice. For allowing a sophisticated choice, geologic investigations into the behavior of the ground mass and the ground water are needed in an early stage of the tunnel project.

18. Vertical Transportation

Despite the popular concept that the elevator was born at the Crystal Palace Exposition, it actually originated in New York City in 1853 when inventor Elisha Graves Otis first successfully demonstrated his revolutionary new concept—the elevator safety gear or break—which was to allow passengers to travel with safety. The true modern passenger elevator was conceived due to a catastrophic event in 1871 known as the Great Chicago Fire, when a three-day fire razed the city to a desolated wilderness on the plains of Illinois. This fateful day on the 8 October 1871 pinpoints exactly the beginning of the modern elevator.

Construction Technology and Constructed World

That what might be constructed is not just products, processes, or systems, but a whole world, is an idea of unique twentieth century provenance. Although its most prominent manifestations are undoubtedly in relation to technology, during the 1900s the concept of construction increasingly became the basis for interpretations of art, architecture, psychology, education, economics, politics, ethics, knowledge, and even mathematics. From the vantage point of such a comprehensive if eclectic constructivism, all of human history is prefatory to an ethos of world fabrication that has been influenced by and in turn influences contemporary technology.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the overwhelming prominence of human construction in the twentieth century—from consumer goods through buildings to cities, from macroscale projects such as the U.S. Interstate Highway system and the European Channel Tunnel to genetic engineering and nanoscale mechanics, also including the unintended anthropogenic impacts on global biodiversity and climate—there exists no systematic overview of the world as an artifact. Instead, the (intentional and unintentional) complexity of the constructed world has thus far been conceived only piecemeal through a plurality of analytic and reflective approaches, among them history, architecture, urban planning, product design, and a diversity of related issues.

The history of such humanoid constructions courses over a million-year trajectory in which artifice remained subordinate initially to direct relations with nature (in hunting and gathering cultures) and then to social organization (in the rise of those axial civilizations characterized by farming and literacy in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and India). This broad distinction between artifice subordinate into natural and social milieux remains defensible even when qualified by the evidence for large-scale human terraforming, perhaps unintentional, prior to the development of literacy.

Mythological assessments of human construction include the stories of Abel and Cain (Genesis 4), the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11), Prometheus, Icarus, and more. Philosophical efforts to assess the relationship began with Plato’s critique of techne practiced independently of wisdom (Gorgias) and Aristotle’s implicit distinction between cultivation and construction. For Aristotle, the primary technai are those that cultivate nature, thereby helping her bring forth more fruitfully that which she is in principle able to bring forth on her own: the arts of agriculture, medicine, and education. Of real but subordinate interest are the constructive arts that produce artifacts such as structures, roads, and ships. Indeed, one way to frame the trajectory of human history over the last 5000 years is from cultivation to construction.

Certainly modernity arose in the fifteenth century in part as a conscious attempt to privilege constructive invention over cultivation. Francis Bacon, among others, called not just for the cultivation of nature but its systematic transformation, and cited as paradigmatic inventions to be imitated the printing press, gunpowder, and the compass. Galileo Galilei and others likewise proposed an augmentation of the human senses by means of the telescope, microscope, and related scientific instruments. It is the new commitment to inventive reconstruction in both the laboratory and the world that formed the basis for an historical emergence two centuries later of the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, the twentieth century in particular has witnessed the instrumentalization of the human sensorium that began in the laboratory and went public to alter the means of communication in commerce, politics, and entertainment (telephone, motion pictures, radio, television, and the Internet).

This historically unprecedented degree of technical mediation by means of tools, machines, and information technologies undermines all efforts to apply to the twentieth century the characterization of previous epochs by reference to the distinctive material substrates (Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, etc.). Although proposals have been made to describe the 1900s as the age of electricity, the atomic age, or the computer age, in truth it is more accurate to define the century not in terms of some specific technology but simply as the technological age—with diverse and ever-diversifying technologies serving as multiple means of world construction.

Even more reflective of the distinctive twentieth century consciousness of the world as construction is the effort to complement retrospect with prospect to forecast what will happen next: technological change, if not progress. Futurology, with roots in prophetic sociology and science fiction, has nevertheless proved largely ineffectual. Relying more on trend analysis and imagination, it fails to engage the constructors themselves or to bring under effective economic or political directives the operative means operative for shaping the future.

Architecture

Efforts to go beyond futurology to develop a systematic analysis of the constructive elements in human affairs that might engage political and economic power grew out of the tradition of reflective building that finds classic expression in De Architectura by Vitruvius (circa 90–20 BC). Originally architecture designated the art of the master builder of the primary structures of the city (temples, palaces, monuments) and the layout of urban spaces in a manner that would reflect cultural ideals about the cosmic place and relations of humans. According to architectural historian Vincent Scully (1991) human builders have two basic options: to imitate natural forms or to oppose them. Compare, for instance, the architecture of indigenous peoples of the southwestern U.S., whose horizontal and earth-toned pueblos blend into a landscape defined by geological sedimentation and erosion, with the vertical thrust of those archetypical twentieth century buildings known as skyscrapers that dominate the cityscapes of Chicago or New York. On the ground, likewise, the modern city is laid out not to conform with a typology and the variegated paths of animal ambulance but as a block grid that extends into an instrumentally surveyed countryside, imposing simplification and legibility over the complex and intimate contours of rivers and mountains. Indeed, as Mumford (1961) states, as the constructed world became more and more extensive, the ‘‘city that was, symbolically, a world’’ was superceded by ‘‘a world that has become, in many practical aspects, a city.’’

Twentieth century transformations in the architecture of the constructed world have been driven by changes in materials, energy, transport and communication, and the commodities of peace and war. The first three achieved during the mid-1900s the apotheosis of developments with roots in the Industrial Revolution. Traditional construction materials such as wood and brick first became standardized and mass produced (e.g., dimensioned lumber), and then superceded as structural elements by iron, steel, and reinforced concrete; coal as an industrial energy source was complemented by oil, gas, and then nuclear power, with energy distribution and end-use itself accumulating from the mechanical and chemical to the electrical and electronic; alongside pre-twentieth century boats and railroads there moved with increasing speed and numbers the inventions of automobiles and airplanes, while communication networks competed with those of transportation to make human world construction a dynamic planet-covering web. The 1960s images of the earth from space, with lighted continents and pollution plumes, visually defined the paradox of multiple-scale human dominance and its responsibilities—even, some argued, its limits.

Focusing first on the static aspects of this dominance, structural engineer David Billington (1983) has analyzed the influence of the new materials of steel and reinforced concrete on structures. For Billington, twentieth century structures are defined by the intersection of three factors: efficiency, (i.e., the scientifically guided pursuit of minimal materials use); economy, the market-monitored effort to reduce monetary cost; and the understated achievement of elegance through maximum symbolic expression (given the least amount of materials and cost). In structures of spare democratic utility such as bridges, tall buildings, and free-spanning roofs over industrial workplaces and warehouses, aircraft hangers, and sports complexes, architectural engineers came into their own.

Structural designers give form to objects that are of relatively large scale and of single use, and . . . see forms as the means of controlling the forces of nature to be resisted. Architectural designers . . . give form to objects that are of relatively small scale and of complex human use, and . . . see forms as the means of controlling the spaces to be used by people [D. Billington, 1983, p. 14].

Bridges can be designed by engineers without architects; houses by architects without engineers. The engineered integration of efficiency and economy is realized in an esthetic of structural simplicity and thinness, as illustrated by the prestressed concrete bridges of Robert Maillart in Switzerland, the exposed steel tube x-bracing of Fazlur Kahn’s John Hancock Center in Chicago, and the ribbed-concrete dome of the Palazzetto dello Sport by Pier Luigi Nervi in Rome.

Unlike structural engineering, early twentieth century architecture was less able to achieve an esthetic integration of science and democratic commerce, in part because it had to contend with well-established traditions of symbolic expression of the built world: the political iconography of Greek and Roman columns, the religious expression of the church spire, the solid facade of the bank, the decoration of Victorian domesticity. As the world-city emerged, architecture found itself caught in a cross-fire between scientific rationalism, industrial commercialism, and poetic romanticism— unclear which way to turn. The fundamental choice appeared to be between acceptance of technology or opposition to it. The winning synthesis was to take the scientifically rationalized artifact, that is, the machine, as an ideal for commercial exploitation and esthetic adaptation. In the architectural profession—itself now internally split into engineer, architect, and construction worker—this synthesis became a search for ways to design buildings that organized space in such a way as to parse human interactions into appropriate routines and to reduce resistance to their rapid interactions while minimizing the labor of construction of buildings for assembly lines, business offices, and large urban populations. The uniquely twentieth century architecture of these ubiquitous constructions, so named by a 1932 exhibition at the New York City Museum of Modern Art, was an ‘‘International Style’’ whose principles were an emphasis on ‘‘volume rather than mass,’’ ‘‘regularity rather than axial symmetry,’’ and the proscription of all ‘‘arbitrary applied decoration.’’ This style, also known as modernism, was the first truly original building form since the rise of twelfth century Gothic.

The international style rejects the building patterns of premodern cultures (Greek, Roman, Gothic) in favor of shapes grounded in the efficient use of new materials and energies. Although steel and concrete were used initially to imitate Roman columns and Gothic arches, just as electric lights were first made to look like candles or gas lamps, in short order both became a flexible means for the design of indeterminate space and openness instead of determinate mass and enclosure. Geometric simplicity stripped of all ornamentation and standardized in modular forms at all levels, from structural members to external facade and finishing elements, contributed both to ease of construction and functional utilization.

Two leaders of this international modernism were Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier. Gropius, as the director of the Bauhaus in Germany, an engineering and product design school of great influence, eagerly embraced the machine esthetic in both buildings and their furnishings. Le Corbusier likewise condemned traditional building, redefined the house as ‘‘a machine for living in,’’ and promoted the construction of whole cities of high-rise concrete apartment houses in repeating blocks connected by open roadways. The high-rise building made possible by the steel frame and electric elevator became a progressively simplified form, as illustrated by the now destroyed World Trade Center towers in New York and the Sears Tower in Chicago, emblematic of that modernist international architecture that dominated the first half of the twentieth century.

Without wholly rejecting the international style, the second half of the century nevertheless witnessed a rising attraction of more complex and interesting architectural spaces—an attraction most visually manifest in a postmodern ironic complexity that playfully revived traditional forms layered over the retained modernist structural elements. The popularity of postmodernism had, however, a counterpoint in the discovery and defense of vernacular architecture.

Urban Planning

As indicated, the constructed world consists not just of structures designed by architects but of cities, including urban and suburban systems, linked with transportation and communication networks across landscapes constructed for farming, recreation, and preservation. Although architecture classically included issues of city design, urban planning has in the twentieth century become an independent profession, due to the manner of engineering and construction work.

At the beginning of the century, urban planner Ebenezer Howard proposed a vision of the garden city at odds with what would emerge as the international style. For Howard the problem of increased urban population was not to be solved simply by efficient modular housing inspired by the standardization and interchangeability of parts and machine construction, but by recognizing what he called the ‘‘twin magnets’’ of the town and the country. The benefits of towns are high wages, sociability, and culture, yet at the cost of high prices and congestion. The countryside is the source of natural beauty and quiet, at the risk of boredom and lack of aspirations.

But neither the Town magnet nor the Country magnet represents the full plan and purpose of nature . . . . Town and country must be married, and out of this joyous union will spring a new hope, a new life, and new civilization [E. Howard 1965 [1902], p. 48].

This utopian vision became a major basis for criticism of the rationalist esthetic of high modernist architecture. Whole new small, mixed-use towns exhibiting an interweave of superblocks with narrower loop streets and cul-de-sacs instead of the repeating box grid were actually constructed in, for instance, Letchworth and Welwyn, England, and Radburn, New Jersey. Such experiments failed to live up to their promises of creating truly selfsustaining communities, as they became enclosed by larger suburban sprawl. Other influences of the garden city ideal can nevertheless be found in landscape architecture and the design of major urban parks, not to mention the construction of state and national parks and forests in both the U.S. and Europe, and eventually throughout the world.

The most practical innovation of early twentieth century urban planning was, however, the establishment of zoning laws that allowed for the political regulation of building practices. By the middle of the century architects and city planners were increasingly working together, with efforts also being made to enhance democratic participation in urban planning. The more grandiose schemes of Le Corbusier (who proposed a rebuilding of Paris) or Robert Moses (the New York state and city official who controlled its park and transportation development for more than 30 years), were moderated by local interests. Between them, social critics such as Jane Jacobs (1961) and urban planners such as Constantive Doxiadis (1963) brought realism and a more inclusive or interdisciplinary holism to thinking about the constructed world on the larger scale. The last half of the century also witnessed a new awakening of efforts among planners to take the natural environment into account in urban planning. Here the work of Ian McHarg (1969) exercised formative influence.

Product Design

Parallel to the architectural development of a machine esthetic at the level of structures, in tension with the organic ideals of urban planners, the commodities of peace and war were undergoing their own constructive transformations. Tools (dependent on human energy and guidance) were increasingly complemented if not replaced by machines (driven by nonhuman energy but still directed by human agents) and eventually semiautonomous machines (requiring only indirect human guidance via feedback systems or programs), with the tools to machines transition continuing from the nineteenth century and dominating during the first half of the twentieth, and the rise of automation highlighting the second half. Distinctive of the century as a whole was the construction of a new type of household commodity— the electrical appliance—and then the electronic tool-machine represented most popularly by radios, televisions, and computers.

Prior to the rise of modern technology, the design of artifacts serving daily life was embedded in the craft of making—a virtually universal activity. Almost everyone was an artisan in the home, workshop, or field, and thus at one and the same time a person who conceived, fabricated, and used the indigenous basics of material culture. People ‘‘designed’’ things in the course of constructing them, so that making seldom involved any substantial moment of thinking through or planning beforehand, but proceeded as intuitive cut-and-try fabrication, guided by indigenous materials, traditions, and community. What has come to be called consumer product testing took place right in the making and immediate using by the maker, with the result that the commodities from regimes of craft production typically exhibit a certain practical artistic quality and honesty.

The Industrial Revolution’s replacement of human power with coal- and steam-driven prime movers, its gearing of power into repetitive motion, and the required divisions of labor in manufacture, brought forth two needs: (1) the need for the designer as standard pattern maker so that artifacts could be mass produced; and (2) a need for the designer as style giver so that they could be mass marketed. Such a separation of design from construction and use could not help but open the door to a qualitative decline in the commodities produced, in reaction to which there emerged diverse efforts to reintroduce ‘‘art’’ into the new regime of industrial production; that is, to reunite what had been separated.

In the early stages, various arts and crafts movements sought to revive aspects of preindustrial modes of production, but at the beginning of the twentieth century the industrial design movement took a different approach, applying to quotidian commodities the principles being pursued in modernist architecture. Indeed, Gropius at the Bauhaus promoted modernist, technological simplification both in buildings and in streamlined furniture (see the famous Marcel Breuer chair). As one leading historian of product design has summarized the movement:

By the end of the Second World War, the practice of styling mechanical and electrical goods to make them appear clean, crisp, geometrical and, above all, modern, had become commonplace. Cars, electric razors, radios, food-mixers, typewriters, cameras, washing-machines, and so on, were all given body-shells reflecting the machine esthetic of efficiency and functionalism [P. Sparke 1986, pp. 49–50].

In the last half of the century, however, in product design as in architecture, questions arose about notions of rational objectivity and universality, especially in a market dependent on advertising. The psychological requirements of the mass consumer were granted increasing legitimacy, so that expendability and playful symbolism began to replace stricter rationalisms. In counterpoint to a culture of waste and simulacra however, designers such as Victor Papanek called first for a new applied realism (1971) and then respect for the ecological imperative (1995) in product design. The question of sustainability emerged in relation to both human markets and the natural environment.

In summary, the constructed world is a historical phenomenon that has during the twentieth century emerged on three levels: the intermediate level of buildings or structures (architecture), the largescale level of cities and landscapes (urban planning), and the small-scale level of consumer goods (product design). There are nevertheless other levels of and perspectives on construction that have been passed over here: the microlevel construction in biotechnology and genetic engineering and nanoscale engineering design, politics and warfare (construction through destruction), the economics of globalization, information technology and the construction of the networked world, and the multiple media-based transformation of life and leisure. There also remains the need for a broadly based, general understanding of construction that would unite such levels and approaches.

References:

• Billington, D.P. The Tower and the Bridge: The New Art of Structural Engineering. Basic Books, New York, 1983.
• Howard, E. Garden Cities of To-Morrow. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1965. First published 1902.
• Sparke, P. An Introduction to Design and Culture in the Twentieth Century. Allen & Unwin, London, 1986.

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• The Vernier Caliper Tool Construction and Usage It is worth to note that a vernier caliper has two pairs of jaws on the top and bottom sides as shown in the diagram below.
• London Wembley Stadium Construction Project However, from a project management perspective, completing Wembley Stadium outside the allocated time and monetary resources amounted to failure of the project.
• Causes of Kuala Lumpur Abandoned Construction Projects Abandoned construction projects are characteristic of the Malaysian construction industry because different literatures have documented hundreds of projects abandoned in the city because of a myriad of reasons. 5 billion adds to the total number […]
• Construction Solutions in Saline Environment The researcher concluded that, indeed, salinity is one of the major causes of concrete disintegration and reduces the durability of buildings in saline environments.
• Risks in International Construction Projects The construction industry is one of the largest and most stable industries in the world, with the overall value of the industry ranging between 2.
• Crane Types Used in Construction There are two major factors that are considered when designing a crane: the first consideration is the weight the crane is expected to lift, and the second consideration is the crane stability.
• Arc de Triomphe. History. Construction Guillaume-Abel Blouet became, in 1832, the architect who finally finished the construction of the arch which was later devoted to the armies of the Revolution and the Empire.
• Audi Car Dealership: Building and Construction Description Other issues discussed include: Site selection for the building Role of the building and the challenges encountered during the entire process of coming up with the wonderful structure Relationship between design, materials used and structural […]
• Iron and Glass Construction During and After the Industrial Revolution The materials used in the construction of the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition building were glass, wood, and cast iron.
• The Crossrail Project’s Construction Process The case study report was written to review and analyze the current scheme of the Crossrail project in London to assist the Infrastructural Planning Committee of the Crossrail project.
• Risks in Construction Projects: Empire State Building The way the project managers in construction projects handle the identified risks is proportional to the success of the project. Depending on the nature of the project, the managers will come up with the possible […]
• Safety at the Construction Sites As the supervisor and the employees heard the estimator fall, they hurried to the scene of accident. The manufacturers of the equipment should ensure that the equipments meets all the measures and standards set by […]
• Villa Construction Project Management The project I have chosen is the construction of a villa. The aim of the project is to construct a villa and have it ready for use within three months.
• House Construction Project Management The construction project is the basis of project scheduling and cost control. The project will increase the product portfolio of the company.
• Building Design and Construction Methods This means that the ground where construction is intended to be put up must be strong enough to bear the weight of the building.
• Burj Khalifa Construction and Operation Cycle The task of creating the tallest construction in the world required designers, engineers, and constructors the creation of a new form and implementation of innovative technologies.
• Project Charter for Construction of Football Pitch at Coventry University The main purpose of the project is to construct a high-tech football pitch for use of the students at Coventry University, which shall minimize the cost of renting playgrounds and avail easy access of the […]
• Construction of Regular Polygons: Octagon The corners or vertices of a polygon are the positions where two of the lines of the polygon intersect. To obtain a single interior angle, then As illustrated, the following steps can be used to […]
• The Construction Industry’s Microeconomic Analysis The construction industry is of great importance in the development of the state: the economic efficiency of related sectors of the economy is primarily ensured by the intensive development of construction.
• Comparison of the Construction Practices in China, the U.S., and India According to the Global Construction 2020 report, India is likely to be the 3rd biggest construction market globally, with the USA and China taking the first positions.
• Saudi Arabian Construction Industry: Delay and Poor Quality The development of the construction industry has widened the scope of the projects and by maintaining the overall profits for the country.
• Wood Technology: Blenheim Bridge Construction The image below shows the site of the bridge: Nicholas Powers, the man who is credited for the design of the longest wooden bridge in the world went to Schoharie in New York to carry […]
• Risk Management in Construction Projects In terms of risk management, a risk plan created at the planning phase of a project helps in further identifying risks and developing a plan to mitigate them.
• Ethical Issues in Road Construction This issue needs to be considered in detail, including relying on the Code of Ethics and the Code of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
• Unions in Construction Sites in Melbourne, Australia The contractor has to show the overall benefit of the construction and the adherence to the standard rates of remuneration to the construction workers.
• Procurement Methods of the Construction Projects The vital significance of procurement in the success of any project necessitate for deliberate measures and consideration in the selection of the most appropriate procurement method.
• The UK Construction Industry’s Risk Management The construction industry is a major generator of waste, and accounts for 50% of the waste deposited in a typical landfill.
• Whole Life Costing vs. Life Cycle Cost in Construction The primary advantage of WLC is the analysis of the costs outside the scope of LCC. In other words, a thorough overview of non-construction costs, income, and externalities is crucial to determining the validity of […]
• Innovation in Construction: Green Technology Innovative solutions for buildings with low energy consumption are actively developed and introduced into modern practice.
• Exposition for the Application to Master in Construction and Real Estate Management at HTW Berlin Countries around the world have realized that the best way of managing the competitiveness of the market is to successfully government and private projects completed in time and as per the expectations.
• Product Tanker: Construction Precedents and Structural Specifications The latter had a LOA of 56 meters, a beam of 8. Ludwig became the first to float a tanker of 104,500 long tons displacement.
• The Bridge Construction Methods The prefabricated bridge component is a primary design of the accelerated bridge construction method for new construction project, renovations, and replacement work.
• JP Phentar: Construction Project Management Tools Due to the unique nature of the project, there is a need for the establishment of an effective managerial framework. One of the most crucial aspects of the construction project is the quality of work.
• Real Estate and Construction Sector in the UAE and the Effects of the Crises on the UAE and the Gulf Real estate and construction sector in UAE The study covers the actual effects of the crisis to the construction and real estate sector in the region which is among the key sectors in the economy […]
• Housing Construction Industry and Economic Shocks The graph below shows the changes in the prices and demand for the housing construction products and services. The demand for housing construction products and services will decrease.
• The National Petroleum Construction Company There are a number of rules and principles that the NPCC employees should observe to meet the code of ethics introduced in the company.
• Pyramids of Giza and Their Construction Mystery One rather outstanding theory is the one proposing the use of ramps in the construction of the Pyramids. In this theory, Herodotus proposes that the stones used to construct the pyramids were lifted using a […]
• SWOT and Construction Management In another study that concentrated on the Azzaro Construction Project, contractors were asked to detail the relevance SWOT had on the effectiveness of the project. In the study of the Azzaro construction project, the contractors […]
• Building Materials and Technologies in Construction As shown in the figure below, the inconsiderate use of modern materials aggravated the damp problem in that particular building. During the visit, the team investigated the owners of the building to understand how the […]
• Dubai Marriott Harbor Hotel: Construction Project This project is a real estate project and the cost of the structures includes the cost of land on which the project is constructed.
• Design: Construction Also to be found on site, is the call forward sheets document that provides a summary of the programme and has details of the supplies needed, including the name and address of the supplier and […]
• Construction Technology Is Reshaping the Industry Many procedures should be followed from the time the construction of the foundation of the house starts till the completion of the house.
• Risk Management in Fly-Fishing and Construction Projects In this case, it is possible to think of the following risks: bad weather conditions, traumas, delays, damage to a boat, misroute. It is possible to think of the following risks: bad weather conditions, gas […]
• The Real Estate and Construction Industry in Saudi Arabia The construction of real estate in Saudi has grown at a very high rate in recent years mainly due to the increasing number of tourists visiting the country and good returns from the oil sector.
• The Role of Building Design in Building Construction These procedures require the collaboration of the team of designers and architects as well as the owner of the building at all the phases of the project.
• Quality Assurance System in Construction On the other hand, it is required to recognize and deal with the risk of loss of value with the same vigilance as has been shown in dealing with the other difficulties so far.
• Medical Imaging Center Construction in Abra Minch Town, Ethiopia It will strike to keep its services focus local and tailoring its products to meet the communities’ demands and in a way that respects the cultures and traditions of the people.
• Holography Construction and Application The reference beam is represented by the electric field as One of the distinct properties of a hologram is that the hologram gets light from each part of the object in the setting.
• Managing Construction: The Grenfell Tower Fire Analysis The Grenfell Tower led to a total of 72 deaths, even though there were speculations that this figure was altered due to the media clampdown on the anomalies surrounding the casualty reports. The Grenfell Tower […]
• Globalisation in the Construction Industry The globalization of construction industry provides the opportunity for the Australian companies to enter the international market and deliver the projects, for example, in the Middle East or Africa.
• Built Facility & Construction Industry Studies Below are the descriptions of these types of organizations: In this category the contractors are referred to as general contractors and these will generally build residential, industrial, commercial, and other related buildings in the industry.
• Williams Construction Co. vs. OSHA In this case, the violation of the Occupational Safety Health Act laws and regulations was the center of the legal procedure.
• Saudi Oil & Gas Engineering, Procurement, Construction Due to the high level of dominance that Saudi has in the oil industry, the country plays a critical role in the determination of the world oil prices.
• 3-D Printing in the Construction Industry Waste production is reduced with the use of 3-D printers. 3-D printing defies the use of traditional forms of construction.
• Pyramids Construction Theories In this article, I will examine two of the theories which have been forward to explain in part the construction of the pyramids.
• Emirates: Eco Friendly Construction The goal of advancing eco friendly principles in the UAE The concept of sustainable development is a direct response to the concerns for environmental degradation and the energy crisis.
• Construction of the Empire State Building The size of the building demanded for the erection of 64 elevators that could be used to convey people and materials up and down the construction.
• Using Agile to Minimize Cost and Timeframe in Eiffel Tower Construction Eifel Tower is 1,067 feet tall and was a success from a financial and time perspective due to the use of the agile methodology in the construction process.
• Road Construction With the Use of Asphalt One of the main reasons for the low prevalence of cement concrete roads is the lack of cement produced based on standardized clinker, which is used for constructing such road surfaces.
• Navigating the Construction of a 100-Bed Special Hospital In the project involving the construction of a 100-bed specialized hospital, key stakeholders include the government, which is the recipient or the customer of the project, regulatory bodies, union workers involved in the process of […]
• Optimization of Modular Integrated Construction Logistics Both the research design and philosophy complement each other because the core of the research is the practicality of the observations, analyses, and recommendations.
• A Trouble in the Truss Construction Shop Taking into account this factor, the breakdown of the truss and the damage to the employee demonstrate the unreliability of this design.
• Construction Administration Code of Ethics They must also use their comprehension, skills, and proficiency to advance their operations and embrace education and transformation to be successful in the future.
• Innovation and Technology in the Construction Industry Construction innovations continue to increase rapidly. Most innovations focus on automation.
• Gender Inequality in the Construction Field It is important that the main actors in the sector understand that gender equality can help reduce the issue of shortage of skill that exists in that field.
• Construction of a New Prison in New York The policies will describe when the need to apply force is suitable in the new facility. Once the facility has been established, the resulting impact on the victim’s family and the community will be accounted […]
• Construction Procurement in Industrialised Building System At the very beginning, the authors of the article began with the definitions and background of the term procurement in the construction industry.
• Forms of Contracts: Types of Construction Contracts Buyers and sellers agree on the total cost incurred in the process and combine it with the profits the contractor demands.
• Discussion Against the Construction of Marvin Nichols Reservoir Personally, I also agree with the sensitization because the construction of the Reservoir would consume thousands of acres of land owned by the local residents.
• Birdhouse Construction for Residential Application These birdhouses are customized to the needs of the client, the number and type of birds, and the weather conditions of the customer’s region.
• New Atomic Power Plant Under Construction in Georgia This will cover the process right from the issuance of the construction permits, the construction process, the size of the output, the type of reactors to be used and the safety measures installed.
• Evolution of Construction Management From 1960s to Today Thus, the basic features of management within the scope of construction were visible already throughout the undertakings of the first people.
• International Engineering Procurement Construction The contractor will be responsible for assessing the design, procurement activities, the actual construction, commissioning and the handover to the owner or operator when the system is ready for operation to ensure that it is […]
• Vulnerability in the Construction Industry: Revising Objectives in the Light of Cyber Threats Due to the possibility of misconfigurations in the management of the construction processes, the outcomes of cyberattacks on construction companies can be dire.
• Construction Contract Dispute Adjudicator and Engineer Adjudicators According to their experience, a civil engineer adjudicator is able to review a construction project in order to ensure the process meets all the contract and code requirements. In general, adjudication is regarded as a […]
• Naflos Investments: A World Number One Construction Company Naflos investments company is a dynamic and leading construction company wishing to expand its business investments into the far East.
• Carbon Footprints and Transportation of Construction Materials The Carbon Footprint Protocol seeks to regulate the use of all materials that contribute to the increase in carbon dioxide levels, including that caused by the transportation of construction materials.
• Environmental Degradation Impacts of Concrete Use in Construction There are various strains of concrete depending on the mode of production and the ratio of its components. To ensure the attainment of desired strength and durability, concrete undergoes the process of hydration.
• Environmental Management for Construction Industry This high-level protection of the environment promotes eco-innovation, which leads to the improvement of the efficiency of the industry and employment opportunities.
• Best Materials for Bi-Polar Plates Construction Investigations Moreover, any corrosion layer will lower the electrical conductivity of the bipolar plates and thus increase the potential loss of PEM fuel cells due to the high electrical resistance.
• Pre-Construction Design Specifications: Water Piping Sub-System The criteria of complexity and implementation are related to the flexible PDS criteria of the system being powering set-up, repeatability of measurement, reduced temperature setup time, and progressive heating/cooling supply temperature.
• Property Taxes Herb Construction Company This is because the taxes of the property are directly due to the development of the property. Therefore, Herb Construction Company should capitalize interest and property taxes of the hotel under construction.
• Constitutional Law: Arbitration and Construction However, voluntary arbitration, as explained above, can either be binding or not, where non-binding arbitration is comparable to the ADR model of mediation, in the aspect that the decision made by the arbitrator cannot be […]
• Method of Construction of Hydro Schemes In the first section, the construction techniques used in the construction of the dams and their hydropower stations are given in detail.
• Privata in Construction Contract: Treaty Confidentiality Doctrine The parties to the contract have the right to enforce the contract in the event of infringement of its terms by any one of them.
• Construction: Sheathing, Steel Cutting and Concrete Slab Making for Corridors Sheathing, however, needs to conform to the ASTM standard requirements regarding the nails that are applied on the gypsum board. The GlasRoc board is designed for use in a roofing system that is mechanically attached […]
• Mediation in the Construction Industry of the UAE Mediation is anchored on six major principles: voluntariness of the parties in determining the procedure, selecting the mediators, and final decision-making; confidentiality of the procedure and its outcomes; equality in the mediator’s relation towards the […]
• Automation and Mechanization and Improving Productivity in Construction Therefore, most researchers in the field of construction engineering are looking at the possibility of automating the safety procedures to reduce the exposure of people in the sites to accidents.
• KLM Construction Company: Purchasing Strategies Companies in this industry are making use of technology to lower the cost of production, reduce the time of completing the projects, and improve the quality of the products they deliver to the market.
• The Construction of Wood-Framed Residential Houses The first step in the pre-construction phrase is to acquire the piece of land where the house will be set up.
• First New York Subway Construction Abstract Introduction Place, period, and size of the first New York subway Civilization and culture were prevalent during the construction How the first New York subway was constructed How Beach’s subway could be built […]
• Construction and Culture: The Forestiere Underground Gardens in California The purpose of the study is to describe the construction of the Forestiere Underground Gardens, the civilization, architecture and culture at the time.
• Construction Law In the construction industry, different conditions, terms or elements exist to ensure that the contract is carried out in a well stipulated manner and that the parties are governed to act in the interests of […]
• Robotics in Construction: Automated and Semi-Automated Devices The robot is fitted with ultrasonic sensors that aid in positioning of the water jet in inclined areas and also the sensors determine the distance of concrete removal.
• Tunnel Design and Construction in Rocks The aims of this project included: Looking at the practical use of skills and techniques in underground tunnel design and construction by undertaking a study on channel tunnel as a case study. Identifying the type […]
• Insurance Policies and Covers in the Construction Industry This dissertation is aimed at exploring the insurance responses shown by construction firms in the industry in their attempt to reduce their exposure to inherent risks in the industry Insurance is a term that refers […]
• Construction Industry International Comparative Analysis International comparative analysis also provides the basis for the formulation of hypotheses and in the selection of the analytical techniques to be used.
• Software Tools in Construction: Design and Management of Projects Application of software is relevant in simulation and visualization of project scope, schemes projection, and monitoring of changes in plan in terms of cost and design.
• Million Dollar Tort Case: Construction Negligence Lawsuit From this incident, it is clear that a construction negligence lawsuit would need a documented breach of duty to the contractor’s side.
• Construction Industry Post-COVID-19 Challenges The scope and the scale of the impact depend on the location of the underlying projects and the respective businesses. Due to the general decline in the economic activities during the covid-19 pandemic, the financial […]
• Museum Construction Stakeholder Analysis The purpose of this report is to justify the existence of the project and discuss the various stakeholders that will be involved in it.
• Chicago School of Architecture: Construction Plan Tribune Tower, which was designed in the 1920s by John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood, is one of the clear examples of works of the first Chicago School of architecture known for being a […]
• Environmental Planning: Dam Construction Environmental planning is when decision making is done to attain development of an area while giving due thought to factors that may include Mother Nature, economic policies and political aspects, governmental policies as well […]
• Buildings Under Construction: Safety Issues The significance of the fire safety issue in buildings under construction can be also seen through the financial losses incurred by such incidents. The fire safety issues that might be involved in buildings under construction […]
• Construction of a New Building for Newton University As a result of the construction of software and hardware laboratories which will be equipped with modern teaching and research equipment will be a plus to the already established ICT standards of Newton University.
• Effect of Modern Methods of Construction MMC includes; Make use of more effective material Speed up hiring delivery Enable high standards of design quality Can help to reduce resource consumption It has often been regarded as a mean of improving quality, […]
• Business Economics & Management for Construction Therefore business economics and management in the construction industry can be looked at as the study and practice of the sum total of all the managerial and technological aspects that are involved in the construction […]
• The Framework of the Construction Industry The construction industry in the UK is having a period of strong growth. Regardless of the rapid growth of other sectors, the housebuilding sector makes up a huge part of the whole construction industry in […]
• Construction Safety on Demolition Some of the measures that should be taken are proper regulation of the area by having competent personnel on such sites, inspecting the materials before the commencement of the demolition process, and having proper inspection […]
• Engineering Communications: Eurotunnel Construction Its the second largest rail tunnel in the world and the longest undersea tunnel with a distance of 37.9 km. The construction of the tunnels was mostly done in the Chalk Marl, this was the […]
• Underrepresentation of Women in the UK Construction Industry Consequently, it is unsurprising that about half of all construction workers in the UK report never having worked with a female manager.
• Mega Stadium Construction Projects The fact is that the complexity of the project comes from the high number of factors that should be taken into account with the primary purpose of achieving success and guaranty the in-time accomplishment of […]
• Construction Bank of China: Workplace Analysis The leader focused on the best initiatives to understand the potential causes of the problem. The members of the team were empowered and encouraged to focus on the best outcomes.
• Construction Law: ALM Technology First, according to the original offer made by Southwest Supplier, Mounger Construction was to purchase the refrigerators at a price that is ten times higher than the sum which was presented on the signed invoice.
• Ethylene Tetrafluoroethylene Construction Material ETFE is a fluoropolymer initially developed for the aerospace industry in the 1940s and eventually adopted for use in greenhouse construction due to its superiority over the glass.
• The Construction Industry of Oman Based on the review of the literature and the survey, the study concludes that lack of coordination among the parties and changes in specifications by the owners are the important factors leading to variations.
• Risk Management in the Construction Industry The paper evaluates the appropriateness of several theories in the management of risks and uncertainties in construction in addition to the process of modeling the chosen risk factors using the new framework.
• Claims in Public Construction Projects in Oman The inherent characteristics of construction projects present a number of risks associated with project execution and make the construction projects vulnerable to financial risks.
• Materials and Resources in Construction and Design Wood is the material that is used to build constructions during the centuries because of the possibility to handle wood in many ways to receive the definite qualities of the material.
• Blue Design Management: Construction Project Success The selection of this title is to show the reader that this research is to create and suggest a blue print on what is the best practice based on the literature, case studies and interviews, […]
• Parsons Brinkerhoff Firm Recruiting Construction Manager To attract a large number of applicants, the company will advertise the position in the newspaper. To be successful, the company will take into consideration the existing laws in the foreign labor market.
• Construction: “Who Invented Your House?” by Cavagh The article looks at the origin, as well as highlights the journey that the balloon frame has undergone over the centuries. According to the author, the current construction technique was coined “the balloon frame” in […]
• Procurement Opportunities in Construction Management The choice between the four types of procurement available in the construction industry leads to a sharp rise in the quality of the result.
• Institutional and Legal Context for Construction The company was contractually obligated to build a product of high quality, and it is safe to assume that this would include all materials and their functioning.
• The UK Construction Sector Evaluation The aim of this paper is to explain why it would be ethical for parents to relinquish some of these rights in order to maximize the welfare of the targeted children.
• Robotics in Construction Management: Impacts and Barriers The assessment of the economic feasibility of the robotization of individual construction processes is based on cost analysis and the calculation of payback.
• UK Construction Industry: Structure and Competitive Strategies Used The UK construction industry is one of the core economic sectors, and the output of the industry is a component of the Gross Domestic Product.
• Green Urbanism in Malaysian Construction Industry The idea of the green city project is to shift the focus of attention away from the Garden City Concept itself and instead turn the only garden in the city into a “city-in-a-garden”.
• Construction Projects in China Since both projects are supposed to be signed with the leaders of the institutions that are under the state regulation, it can be assumed that the provisions of the Model Construction Project Contract are applicable […]
• The Heathrow’s T5 Construction: Balanced Scorecard The building of the Airport applied the economic focus, internal focus, learning and growth focus, and the customer experience focus. Before the project started, the public had the opportunity to raise questions on whatever issue […]
• Marbles Construction Company’s Conflict Management The 2009 agreement was meant to safeguard the interests of both the company and the employees. Most of the supervisors and mid-level managers were in support of the workers’ requests and this made it difficult […]
• Quality Performance Monitoring in Construction Thus, the nature of the construction project presupposes several tasks that should be added to the existing project plan to guarantee the efficient monitoring of quality and overall success.
• Giza Pyramids and Major Construction Theories The lack of technology has made it a difficult practical concept to accept, leading to the rise of various theories on the construction of the Pyramids at Giza.
• Simulation as a Construction Tool and Its Economics To ensure the stability of the progress in the use of simulation for construction purposes, it is necessary to perform a constant evaluation and assessment of the work that has already been done.
• Bridge Construction Over the Chacao Channel An article titled The Challenge of Constructing a Bridge over the Chacao Channel talks about a project of the government to build a rather large bridge.
• Environmental Sustainability in the Construction Sector This paper aims at exploring the evidence of climate change in the UK, the contributing factors, and the potential consequences of it, including the floods.
• CSR in Jordan Construction Industry In the construction industry, CSR plays a significant role in ensuring that projects create employment for the locals, the environment is protected, energy is conserved, the land is utilized in an economically sound manner, construction […]
• Prefabrication and Simulation in Construction One of the tools that can assist in improving the overall performance of the construction industry is the visualisation of projects.
• Financial Crisis and Its Impact on UAE Construction The determination of this research is to evaluate the enactment of construction corporations in the United Arab Emirates for the period of the pre and post worldwide eras of financial disaster, which is from 2006 […]
• Clapton Commercial Construction Company Strategies However, the most crucial role of the human resource department is to understand and implement the employment laws in the new jurisdictions.
• Modular Construction in Hospital Buildings The decision to fall back on this type of construction is very often motivated by the need to meet the strict deadline for erecting buildings, as modular construction is known for high quality that can […]
• Giza Pyramids’ Mysteries: Theories of Construction Additionally, the idea of the mystery of the construction process revolves around the fact that the technologies of the ancient Egyptians do not equal the architectural designs of the pyramids.
• Construction: Tool Boxes for Machine Shop Since carbon fiber is much more durable than the rest of the materials suggested as the basis for making boxes, it should be selected as the key raw substance for creating boxes for the company […]
• UAE Construction and Real Estate Sector This paper is aimed at examining the role of the construction and real estate sector in developing the economy and infrastructure of the United Arab Emirates.
• Safety Management at Construction Sites in the UAE Safety management is the process that helps to define the principles of work and measure the processes to prevent different types of accidents and injuries that can lead to the negative outcomes for an organisation […]
• Trans-Alaska Pipeline Construction History The pipeline would run from the North Slope to the Port of Valdez. The pipeline transports crude oil from the fields in Prudhoe Bay south to the Port of Valdez.
• The Ayla Event Hall Construction Project This project will be successful if the Project Management Committee is able to deliver the project on time and within the budget allocated by the Ayla Residents Association. Secondly, the project will deliver all the […]
• WLAN Deployment on Open Area Construction Projects
• XYZ Construction LLC: HR Management
• Lawsuits in Construction: Carvalho vs. Toll Brothers Case
• Robyville Bridge History, Construction and Importance
• Queens Midtown Tunnel: Construction History
• Ward House Design and Construction
• Comparing Construction Practice of China, America, India
• Negotiation in Construction Industry Disputes: UAE Situation
• Cost Effective and Sustainable Practices for Project Construction in the UAE
• Kuwait Walls Construction Periods
• Project for the Design and Construction of a Bridge Across the Murray River
• 457 Visa in Australia. Management Foundations Construction
• Railroad Supply and Demand. Turner Construction Company
• Integrating Building Information Management (BIM) Into Construction Supply Chain Management
• Virtual Reality in Construction
• “Risk Perception and Cultural Differences of Latinos Across Residential, Commercial, and Heavy Construction” by Kane Bormann
• The Construction Forestry Mining Energy Union’s Strike
• A Comparison of Construction Surety Bond and Insurance
• Value and Risk Management in a Construction Project
• Tendering and Procurement in the Construction Industry
• Private Construction of Government Sponsored Projects
• Value and Risk Management in the Chinese Construction Industry
• California High-Speed Rail Construction Project
• Safe Working Conditions in the Construction Industry
• Construction Failure: Swanston Street Wall Collapse
• Construction Safety and Accidents in Latino Community
• Occupational Injuries in the Construction Industry
• Construction Surety Contract Bond Underwriting Risk Evaluation
• Construction Safety in Latino Community
• BBC Construction Market Analysis
• Motivating Employees: Japanese Construction Company
• Construction Project Management Strategic Issues
• The Balance Between Sustainable Construction and Project Success in the Current Economical Situation in the UK
• The Project Manager in Construction
• Construction Projects Success Factors
• Negotiation in Construction Industrial Dispute, an Assessment of Uae Situation
• FDI Strategic Plan for Baxtern & Doll Construction Company
• Construction Company Auditing Process
• Alternative Dispute Resolution in the Construction Industry: UAE Situation
• The Contemporary Lean Construction Problems
• Quebec Bridge Construction
• Critical Issues in the Design and Construction of the Qatar World Cup Buildings and Facilities in 2022
• Transcontinental Railway Construction
• Construction Work on Indian Reservations: Governor Advisory
• Has the Concept of ‘Partnering’ Succeeded or Failed in the Australian Construction Industry?
• Fall Accidents in Construction Industry
• Value and Risk Management in Construction UAE
• Risk Allocation in the Construction Contract
• Great Constructions of the World
• A Contract by a Construction Firm in the United Arab Emirates
• Caspian Construction PLC: Security Management
• Facade Constructions: Experience and Technology Advancements
• Construction Products: Increasing Productivity and Profitability
• Carbon-DI-Oxide in the Construction Industy
• The U.S. Housing Construction Sector Risks Management
• Sustainability and Waste Management in the Australian Construction Industry
• Automated Construction Performance Monitoring
• Physical Capital in Ruiz Construction Company
• Fall Protection in the Construction Industry
• Analysis of Data on the Green Space Areas in Sydney With Regard to the Importance of Dwelling Construction Programmes
• ”Cutting Roadside Tree”: Engineering and Construction for Road Safety
• Rules of Negotiation in Construction Contract Management
• Industrial Revolution Research Ideas
• Quality Control Research Topics
• Occupational Health Paper Topics
• Employment Law Paper Topics
• Risk Assessment Questions
• Performance Indicators Essay Topics
• Quality Assurance Questions
• Public Safety Research Ideas
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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• Construction Management

Top 50 Innovative Construction Management Project Topics for 2024

Last Updated on February 19, 2024 by Admin

As we rapidly approach 2024, the construction industry stands at the forefront of innovation and progress, with construction management playing a pivotal role in shaping the sector’s future. With increasing emphasis on sustainability , technological advancements, and ever-changing market dynamics, professionals and students constantly seek fresh ideas and inspiration for their projects and research.

In response to this demand, we have compiled an extensive list of the top 50 innovative construction management project topics for 2024 . These topics encompass diverse areas, including cutting-edge technologies , green building practices , workforce development, and much more. By exploring these forward-thinking topics, you can stay ahead of industry trends, enhance your knowledge, and contribute to the ongoing evolution of construction management.

Whether you are a seasoned construction management professional, a curious student seeking a captivating research project, or an industry expert searching for new ideas, this comprehensive list promises to inspire and inform. So, without further ado, let’s delve into the exciting world of construction management and discover the groundbreaking project topics that will define the industry in 2024 and beyond.

Top 50 Latest Construction Management Project Topics

In this comprehensive collection, we have meticulously curated a list of 50 cutting-edge construction management project topics that will provide valuable insights for industry practitioners, students, and researchers.

These topics span many areas, including project planning, risk management , sustainable construction, BIM, and Lean construction .

Exploring these trends will enhance your understanding of the industry’s challenges and opportunities and position yourself at the forefront of innovative construction management practices.

Related Course:

• Sustainable Engineering Design
• Solar Energy Engineering
• Major Engineering Project Performance
• Introduction to Engineering Mechanics

Construction management projects play a crucial role in the development and success of the construction industry. By exploring various construction management project topics, professionals and students can gain valuable insights and stay informed about the latest trends.

A project for construction management often involves interdisciplinary collaboration, combining technical knowledge with management skills. Exploring project topics in construction management, such as sustainable building practices and innovative technologies, helps advance the field by promoting efficiency and improving overall project outcomes.

Similarly, project topics for construction management can focus on workforce development and safety management , ensuring the well-being and productivity of workers.

Project topics on construction management address unique industry challenges, such as labor shortages and regulatory compliance. In contrast, a project on construction management provides an opportunity to apply knowledge and skills in real-world scenarios.

By engaging in construction management projects, professionals and students can contribute to the ongoing growth and success of the construction sector .

So, whether you are a seasoned construction professional , a student searching for a thesis topic, or simply an enthusiast eager to learn more about the industry, this blog section is your one-stop destination for discovering the latest construction management project topics are shaping the future of the built environment.

Dive in, and let’s embark on this journey of knowledge and innovation together!

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1. Integration of Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Internet of Things (IoT) for Smart Construction Management

This project explores the potential of combining BIM and IoT technologies to improve construction management processes. It aims to develop a framework that allows for real-time monitoring, analysis, and decision-making based on the data generated by IoT devices in the construction environment.

2. The Impact of Modular Construction on Project Delivery and Cost Efficiency

This project investigates the benefits of modular construction in terms of project delivery and cost efficiency. It aims to compare traditional construction methods with modular approaches and provide recommendations for improving construction processes and reducing overall costs.

3. Implementation of Artificial Intelligence in Construction Risk Assessment and Mitigation

This project examines the application of artificial intelligence in identifying, evaluating, and mitigating risks in construction projects . The study will focus on developing AI-based tools and algorithms to enhance decision-making and increase the efficiency of risk management .

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4. Advancements in 3D Printing Technologies for Sustainable Construction

This project explores the latest advancements in 3D printing technologies for construction and their implications for sustainability. The study aims to analyze the potential benefits of 3D printing in construction projects and how it can reduce waste and improve resource efficiency.

5. The Role of Big Data Analytics in Construction Project Management

This project investigates the potential of big data analytics in optimizing construction project management processes. It aims to develop a comprehensive understanding of the various data sources, analytical techniques, and tools that can be used to enhance decision-making and project outcomes.

6. Enhancing Construction Safety through Virtual Reality (VR) Training

This project examines the effectiveness of using virtual reality (VR) technology for construction safety training. The study will evaluate the impact of VR-based training on workers’ understanding of safety procedures and their ability to identify and avoid potential hazards.

7. Green Building Materials and Technologies: Assessing Their Potential in Sustainable Construction

This project evaluates the potential of various green building materials and technologies in promoting sustainable construction practices . It aims to analyze these materials and technologies’ performance, cost-effectiveness, and environmental benefits.

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8. The Influence of Lean Construction Principles on Project Performance

This project investigates the impact of implementing lean construction principles on project performance. The study will analyze the key principles of lean construction and assess their effectiveness in reducing waste, improving productivity, and enhancing overall project outcomes.

9. Resilient Construction Practices for Climate Change Adaptation

This project examines the role of resilient construction practices in adapting to climate change . The study will focus on identifying innovative materials, technologies, and design strategies that can enhance the resilience of buildings and infrastructure to extreme weather events and other climate change-related risks.

10. The Future of Construction Robotics: Opportunities and Challenges

This project explores the current state of construction robotics and its future potential to transform the industry. The study will analyze the latest developments in construction robotics, including autonomous construction equipment , drones , and exoskeletons , and discuss the challenges and opportunities associated with their widespread adoption.

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11. Evaluating the Benefits of Prefabrication in Modern Construction Projects

This project investigates the advantages of using prefabrication techniques in modern construction projects. The study aims to evaluate the impact of prefabrication on project timelines, cost efficiency, quality control, and overall sustainability.

12. Integrating Renewable Energy Systems into Building Design and Construction

This project explores the potential of incorporating renewable energy systems into building design and construction practices. The study will focus on identifying innovative strategies for integrating solar, wind, and geothermal energy systems into buildings and assessing their potential benefits regarding energy efficiency and environmental performance.

13. The Role of Augmented Reality (AR) in Construction Project Collaboration and Quality Control

This project investigates the potential of augmented reality (AR) technology i n enhancing construction project collaboration and quality control. The study will focus on developing AR-based tools and applications to improve communication and visualization of construction plans , promote real-time collaboration between team members, and streamline quality control processes. Additionally, the project will explore the benefits and challenges associated with adopting AR technology in the construction industry , including its impact on project timelines, cost efficiency, and overall outcomes.

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This project investigates the potential of augmented reality (AR) technology in enhancing construction project planning and execution. The study will focus on developing AR-based tools and applications to improve collaboration, communication, and visualization of construction plans and progress.

15. Assessing the Impact of Drones on Construction Site Monitoring and Management

This project examines the use of drones in construction site monitoring and management. The study aims to evaluate the benefits of drone technology in terms of cost efficiency, safety, and overall construction project outcomes.

16. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of Construction Materials: A Comparative Study

This project investigates the environmental impacts of various construction materials through a life cycle assessment (LCA) approach. The study aims to compare the environmental performance of traditional and alternative materials and provide recommendations for selecting environmentally friendly materials in construction projects.

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17. The Influence of Digital Twins on Construction Project Management

This project explores the potential of digital twins in construction project management . The study will focus on developing a framework for creating and utilizing digital twins throughout the project life cycle and assessing their impact on project performance and decision-making.

18. Optimizing Construction Supply Chain Management through Advanced Technologies

This project investigates the potential of advanced technologies, such as blockchain and machine learning, in optimizing construction supply chain management. The study aims to comprehensively understand the current state of construction supply chains and the potential benefits of adopting these technologies.

19. A Study on Construction Workforce Development and Retention Strategies

This project explores the challenges and opportunities associated with construction workforce development and retention. The study aims to identify effective strategies for attracting, training, and retaining skilled workers in the construction industry.

20. The Role of Smart Contracts in Construction Project Procurement and Contract Management

This project examines the potential of smart contracts in streamlining construction project procurement and contract management processes. The study will focus on developing a comprehensive understanding of the benefits and challenges associated with the adoption of smart contracts in the construction industry.

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21. Assessing the Impact of Offsite Construction on Housing Affordability

This project investigates the potential of offsite construction techniques in addressing housing affordability issues. The study aims to evaluate the cost-effectiveness, quality, and overall benefits of offsite construction methods in comparison to traditional onsite construction.

22. The Role of Circular Economy Principles in Sustainable Construction Practices

This project explores the potential of applying circular economy principles in construction practices. The study will focus on identifying strategies for reducing waste, extending the life cycle of materials, and promoting resource efficiency in the construction industry.

23. Evaluating the Performance of Green Roofs in Urban Environments

This project investigates the environmental, social, and economic benefits of green roofs in urban environments. The study will focus on evaluating the performance of green roofs in terms of energy efficiency, stormwater management, biodiversity, and overall sustainability.

24. The Impact of Autonomous Construction Equipment on Productivity and Safety

This project examines the potential benefits and challenges associated with the adoption of autonomous construction equipment. The study will focus on evaluating the impact of autonomous equipment on construction site productivity, safety, and overall project outcomes.

25. Investigating the Potential of Machine Learning in Construction Cost Estimation

This project explores the application of machine learning techniques in construction cost estimation. The study aims to develop AI-based models for accurately predicting construction costs, thereby enhancing decision-making and project planning processes.

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26. The Impact of Globalization on Construction Management Practices

This project investigates the influence of globalization on construction management practices, including cross-border collaboration, international standards, and the adoption of new technologies.

27. Construction Workforce Diversity and Inclusion: Challenges and Opportunities

This project examines the current state of workforce diversity and inclusion in the construction industry, identifying challenges and opportunities for improvement.

28. The Role of Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) in Infrastructure Development

This project explores the potential benefits and challenges of public-private partnerships in the development and management of infrastructure projects.

29. Evaluating the Effectiveness of Building Certification Systems

This project investigates the effectiveness of various building certification systems (e.g., LEED, BREEAM) in promoting sustainable construction practices and driving industry-wide improvements.

30. Construction Waste Management: Strategies and Best Practices

This project examines current strategies and best practices for managing construction waste, aiming to provide recommendations for reducing waste generation and promoting recycling and reuse.

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31. The Influence of Cultural Factors on Construction Project Management

This project explores the impact of cultural factors, such as communication styles, decision-making processes, and organizational structures, on construction project management practices.

32. Investigating the Relationship between Construction Management and Real Estate Development

This project examines the connections between construction management practices and real estate development processes, aiming to identify opportunities for increased efficiency and collaboration.

33. The Role of Geospatial Technologies in Construction Management

This project investigates the potential applications of geospatial technologies, such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS), in construction management practices.

34. Developing Sustainable Construction Education and Training Programs

This project focuses on creating and evaluating education and training programs that promote sustainable construction practices and foster a culture of continuous improvement.

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35. The Impact of Climate Change Policies on Construction Project Planning and Design

This project explores the influence of climate change policies on construction project planning and design, considering how regulatory frameworks and industry standards are evolving in response to global environmental challenges.

36. The Future of the Construction Industry: Predicting Trends and Technologies

This project aims to identify emerging trends and technologies in the construction industry and assess their potential impact on construction management practices.

37. Assessing the Role of Construction Management in Urban Planning

This project examines the relationship between construction management and urban planning, exploring opportunities for collaboration and integration to support sustainable urban development.

38. Evaluating the Impact of Building Automation Systems on Construction Management

This project investigates the influence of building automation systems on construction management practices, focusing on the benefits and challenges of incorporating these technologies into new and existing buildings.

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39. Construction Project Management in Post-Disaster Reconstruction

This project examines the role of construction project management in post-disaster reconstruction efforts, focusing on best practices, challenges, and opportunities for improvement.

40. Exploring the Potential of Blockchain Technology in Construction Supply Chain Management

This project investigates the potential applications of blockchain technology in construction supply chain management , aiming to identify opportunities for increased transparency, efficiency, and collaboration.

41. Construction Quality Management: Tools, Techniques, and Best Practices

This project examines current tools, techniques, and best practices for construction quality management, aiming to provide recommendations for improving quality control and assurance processes.

42. Investigating the Role of Construction Management in Heritage Conservation

This project explores the potential contributions of construction management practices to heritage conservation efforts, focusing on the unique challenges and opportunities associated with preserving historical and culturally significant structures.

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43. Assessing the Impact of Social Media on Construction Project Marketing and Communication

This project investigates the influence of social media platforms on construction project marketing and communication strategies, identifying best practices and potential pitfalls.

44. Evaluating the Effectiveness of Construction Management Software Solutions

This project examines the effectiveness of various construction management software solutions in streamlining project management processes and improving project outcomes.

45. The Role of Construction Management in Promoting Occupational Health and Well-being

This project explores the potential contributions of construction management practices to promoting occupational health and well-being among construction workers, focusing on strategies for reducing stress and improving overall job satisfaction.

46. Investigating the Relationship between Construction Management and Facility Management

This project examines the connections between construction and facility management , aiming to identify opportunities for increased efficiency and collaboration throughout the building lifecycle.

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47. Exploring the Role of Drones in Construction Site Safety Management

This project investigates the potential applications of drones in construction site safety management, focusing on their ability to monitor hazards, track worker behavior, and support incident response efforts.

48. The Impact of Building Information Modeling (BIM) on Facilities Management

This project explores the influence of Building Information Modeling (BIM) on facilities management practices, focusing on the potential benefits and challenges of integrating BIM data into building operations and maintenance processes.

49. Investigating the Potential of Augmented Reality (AR) in Construction Site Safety Training

This project examines the potential applications of augmented reality (AR) technology in construction site safety training, aiming to assess the effectiveness of AR-based training in improving worker knowledge and hazard recognition skills.

50. Assessing the Role of Construction Management in Sustainable Urban Development

This project explores the potential contributions of construction management practices to sustainable urban development efforts, focusing on strategies for improving resource efficiency, reducing waste, and promoting social and economic sustainability in urban construction projects.

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Key Resources and Strategies for Final Year Construction Management Projects

Final-year construction management projects are essential to a student’s academic journey, allowing them to apply their knowledge and skills to real-world scenarios.

To ensure success, students should explore resources like “successful construction project management pdf,” which offers insights and best practices for managing construction projects effectively.

Pursuing an M.E. in construction engineering and management projects can further enhance their expertise in the field. Construction project planning is a critical aspect of these projects, as it helps students develop a comprehensive strategy for managing resources, timelines, and budgets.

Students can consult the “construction management project topics pdf” to find inspiration for their project ideas and explore various aspects of construction management , such as construction planning, to ensure a well-rounded understanding of the discipline.

The construction management system project practically applies various construction management principles and processes. Students can learn from examples of construction projects, gaining insights into different challenges and approaches to ensure the completion of their final-year projects.

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In conclusion, the t op 50 innovative construction management project topics for 2024 serve as a testament to the ever-evolving nature of the construction industry . By embracing these cutting-edge concepts and staying informed about the latest trends, professionals and students alike can contribute to the ongoing transformation of construction management. As we progress, all industry stakeholders must remain adaptable, open to new ideas, and committed to fostering sustainable, efficient, and technologically advanced practices . By doing so, we can collectively shape the construction industry’s future and ensure its continued growth and success for years to come. So, as you embark on your next construction management project or research endeavor, remember to draw inspiration from these innovative topics and strive to make a lasting, positive impact on the industry and the world at large.

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Digital transformation will streamline project management through automation, improved communication, and real-time data analysis, resulting in increased productivity and reduced costs.

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SPECIALTY GRAND CHALLENGE article

Grand challenges in construction management.

• Department of Architecture, Faculty of Engineering, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, United Kingdom

This article is written for the launch of the specialty section on construction management at the Frontiers in Built Environment. This new specialty section opens an on-line platform for academics and practitioners in the subject field to share valuable experiences and findings from innovative research and development as well as practices, which focus on the management of people/workforce, product/production, and processes across built environment project stages, including development and construction, operation and maintenance, as well as demolition and redevelopment, under considerations on the dependability and productivity of construction management services. In this article, the writer presents his humble opinions limited from experiences from academic research and professional services around the world in the past three decades. The topics derived on grand challenges in construction management are gigantic in terms of their coverages, but may have huge impacts on professional development in both short and longer term. Discussions presented here on grand challenges in construction management consist of four parts to respectively focus on an initial cognitive framework of the construction management body of knowledge (CMBOK), intelligence pervasive construction management systems, interdisciplinary digital innovation, and solutions for performance enhancement in megaproject delivery. The research methodology that support the writer to describe the four grand challenges includes literature review, comparison study, site observation, and system architecture analysis and development. It was the writer's initial abductive reasoning to identify the four grand challenges in construction management through an extensive literature review, which was based on national and regional strategies for the construction industry from the world top economies. Some key references relating to these four major topics are collected to support discussions in this article. It is expected that this article could contribute to the debate as well as research and development in construction management in terms of continuous technical enhancements on project-oriented performance and value regardless the scope, the location, and the time associated and concerned. As the study was conducted through abductive reasoning, this article should have its limitation on the coverage to all grand challenges in construction management, and this should leave many unanswered questions for further exploratory research.

Introduction

Construction management (CM) is an important field of management practice oriented research into related issues at both the macro and micro sphere across the entire life cycle ( CIOB, 2010 ) of the built environment. The macro sphere of CM can generally cover all management related issues on the built environment across its life-cycle stages; for example, the industry wide statistics, analysis and projections on codes and standards, building information management, procurement and contracts, supply network, workforce productivity, and workplace health and safety, etc. at national, regional and/or international level. The micro sphere of CM, on the other hand, covers specific issues relating to project delivery at various work stages; for example, project specific study on feasibility, cost plan, design justification, process schedule, risk assessment, quality and traceability assurance, productivity analysis, post occupancy evaluation, and service level agreements, etc. The cross-stage process of CM makes it possible to conduct inter-connected professional services for clients to have maximum value from investment.

Since the principles of scientific management was put forward by Taylor (1911) , the theory has profound influence to the evolving theory of management science in over 10 decades, and there has been a significant theoretical evolution in the management world. As summarized by Jones and George (2016) , the evolution of management theories in the past century has demonstrated a trans-disciplinary development across five fundamental theories, including the scientific management theory, the administrative management theory, the behavioral management theory, the management science theory, and the organizational environment theory. This theoretical evolution in management science has eventually formed an entire body of knowledge (BOK) for management practice in various professional fields across industry sectors, and consequently it has continuously provided strong theoretical support to CM oriented research and practice.

The purpose of this article is to describe a recent research undertaken by the author to identify grand challenges in construction management in response to present national/regional strategies for the construction industry in world top economies, and to inform decision making on further research and development as well as learning and training with regard to the enhancement of dependability and productivity in construction management services. In order to justify the need for this research, the author has looked into the gigantic accumulation of related resources as collected in not only civil engineering databases at ASCE (2019) and ICE (2019) but also multidisciplinary databases on the Web of Science platform ( Clarivate, 2019 ), and the search term used is “challenges AND construction management.” It has been found that there is limited number of publications related to this topic, and it looks there is currently no publication dedicating to a discussion on grand challenges in CM focused research and development. From this point of view, this article has the opportunity to fill the gap in research into construction management.

This article is based on the author's observations through academic research and professional services in related areas around the world over the past three decades. Based on a further review on grand challenges and strategic priorities for the construction sector in six world's major economies, including United States, China, Japan, Germany, United Kingdom, and European Union, four grand challenges that reflect national/regional strategic priorities were eventually derived as significant ones. Table 1 is used to clarify the reflection of four perceived grand challenges in construction management to existing strategic proprieties in these world's major economies. It's the author's opinion that these four grand challenges are responsive to those national/regional strategies and therefore could be useful with further discussions to inform further research and development in construction management with regard to the pursuit of national/international leadership in this subject field.

Table 1 . Four topics on grand challenges in construction management.

According to this simplified independent response to the national/regional strategic priorities for the construction sector in the six world's major economies, this article aims to provide further discussions on the four grand challenges, and focuses on Frontiers of Research and Development in Construction Management with regard to the increasing need for service dependability and productivity in the development and operation of the built environment in both short and a relative longer term. This article therefore covers four topics on the four grand challenges in relation to three identified managerial domains on people/workforce, product/production, and processes, respectively, in the provision of CM services.

In developing the contents of this article, the four grand challenges are used for its structure to cover the following specific discussions:

• The grand challenge on the development and use of a theoretical CMBOK framework and its contents in accordance with research and practice accumulated across disciplines over long term in the past,

• Two grand challenges, in response to the needs for intelligent management systems and interdisciplinary digital innovations respectively, in order to improve the performance of constructions management services, and

• The grand challenge on technical enhancement for construction management in megaproject delivery in order to promote best practices through large-scale construction management services.

The relevance of these topics to the three management domains derived from an extensive review on five main management theories (see Figure 1 ) is further described in Table 1 . This qualitative analysis helped the author to make decision on topics to discuss grand challenges in construction management.

Figure 1 . Management domains of CMBOK interconnected with management theories.

This article is based on the author' recent research through the use of two methods, including extensive literature review and qualitative comparison study, while his long-term experiences and observations in academic research and professional practices were also incorporated. In addition, this article has been thoroughly improved according to a huge amount of insightful comments given by reviewers.

In this article, the author uses terms, including the dependability of construction management services and the dependable built environment, to incorporate the need for dependability ( Chen, 2017 ) at life-cycle stages of the built environment. According to the only three results from searching on Google as of 3 November 2018, the term dependable built environment was also used in practice by the Stonepay Construction in Canada. For the built environment, dependability ( BSI, 2014 ) can be regarded as a collective term for time-related quality characteristics with regard to the ability to perform as and when required throughout the life cycle of either a product or a service. It is the author's assumption that the incorporation of dependability with the technical term of built environment on the product side and construction management on the service side can facilitate an integrated measure that can cover engineering and management aspects connecting to dependability characteristics, which can include adaptability, availability, construability, durability, maintainability, recoverability, reliability, health and safety, security, supportability, and sustainability, etc. It is the author's opinion that the use of dependability for both built environment as the product and its life-cycle oriented services can effectively integrate various interconnected considerations and decision making on people/workforce, products/production, and processes in construction management for quantified quality assurance across its whole life cycle oriented services in the built environment. While numerous cases have shown that a lack of dependability may have significantly adverse impact through rewordings on productivity, it is important to give priority to dependability in the pursuit of productivity in construction management.

It is the author's expectation for this article to be useful for not only colleagues working on innovative research and development in the subject field of construction management, but also the specialty section on construction management at the Frontiers in Built Environment to be part of long-term leadership development in research and development for the construction management profession across the world. As the four described grand challenges were derived in response to current national/regional strategies for the construction sector in major economies, further research and development under the four grand challenges are also expected in order to timely and effectively support technical enhancements on both dependability and productivity in construction management services for the sustainable built environment.

Construction Management Body of Knowledge (CMBOK)

The first grand challenge to discuss is to establish a CMBOK, which can be useful for construction management oriented learning, practice, research and development in terms of both dependable professional services and continuous technical enhancements. Generally speaking, construction management is an elemental subject of the built environment discipline, and it is an essential professional service interactively connecting with other specific professions working inside the construction industry. It has extensive connections to other subject fields such as planning, design, and operation ( CIOB, 2010 ) within the built environment sector, in addition to resources and manufacturing, computing and programming, transportation and supply management, legislations and governances from other adjunct sectors to support its work procedure at various stages. For professional construction management services, there are mature work procedures such as the definitive UK model Plan of Work ( RIBA, 2013 ), the code of practice such as the CIOB (2014) Code of Practice for Project Management for Construction and Development, and regulations such as the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015 ( HSE, 2015 ) in the United Kingdom. Construction management is therefore a dedicated profession that provides services focusing on construction to satisfy both project-wide and industry-wide needs for professional management within the built environment.

Management Domains

The BOK for a specific subject field is generally essential and useful for both practice toward excellence and research for innovation. As a good example, the body of knowledge for project management (PMBOK) ( PMI, 2017 ) has demonstrated the value of BOK in project management across industry sectors over the past two decades. It was originally published and continuously updated at the Project Management Institute ( PMI, 2017 ) to guide practice in project management, and eventually adopted by the International Organization for Standardization ( ISO, 2012 ) as an international standard for project management. In addition to professional guidance for general project management, PMI (2016) has continuously provided the extension to the PMBOK ® Guide for construction management since 2003, and this provides useful reference to form the CMBOK. The author would like to determine CMBOK as a set of structured descriptions about professional knowledge and underpinned techniques to sustain dependable quality services of construction management at both macro and micro scale in the built environment.

In connection with the evolution of theories and technologies in engineering and management, the technical scope of construction management has been enlarged, and the delivered service focuses on enhanced dependence and efficiency across life-cycle work stages ( CIOB, 2010 ). It is a matter of fact that an enormous amount of endeavors made by academics and practitioners in construction management worldwide is a huge contribution to form the CMBOK, although there is currently not a definitive framework, such as the PMBOK ( PMI, 2016 , 2017 ) and the Civil Engineering Body of Knowledge (CEBOK) ( ASCE, 2008 , 2019 ), for construction management in both project-wide and industry-wide scale. It is therefore a big task for further research into the cognitive framework of CMBOK and its elements and contents with regard to three identified cognitive domains, including people, products and processes (See Figure 1 ), to foster innovations in a more effective way for not only the dependence and efficiency of this professional service in practice, but also quality higher education ( Pellicer et al., 2013 ) and continuing professional development (CPD) ( Chen et al., 2006b ) for professionals and students, respectively.

For the three technical domains mentioned above on people/workforce, products/production, and processes in construction management, Figure 1 is used to clarify its origin by illustrating the connections between management theories ( Jones and George, 2016 ) to three identified main management domains that can be used to structure the construction management body of knowledge (CMBOK). It summarizes five representative toolkits derived from management theories that can support construction management on three managerial domains, which cover people/workforce, products/production, and processes. These managerial domains are identified through an extensive review into the five management theories with regard to fundamental issues that they are dealing with. As described by Oakland and Marosszeky (2017) and Kajima (2018) based on need for best practices, these domains are essential for total construction management (TCM) that enables a comprehensive use of all contemporary management theories to tackle issues on workforce, production, and processes across project life cycle in the built environment. In theory, TCM can be used as a term for the provision of all types of specific construction management services together under one contract, in comparison with construction management that refers to professional services in a generic term.

It is profoundly meaningful for the CM profession to have a cognitive framework of the body of professional knowledge, like the one ASCE and PMI have been working on for continuous professional development and further research. There are several critical reasons to justify its importance with regard to its value for different stakeholders involved in construction management. For stakeholders such as construction contractors, it could be a useful guide to take the initiative under the blue ocean strategy ( Kim and Mauborgne, 2004 ), which is defined as the simultaneous pursuit of differentiation and low cost to open up a new market space and create new demand, to develop outstanding expertise above horizontal competition. In other words, a bespoke BOK can ensure a sound development of expertise in providing professional services in one or more specific areas within an entire knowledge map. For clients who invest in the construction project, it is a useful benchmark for them to evaluate the performance of construction management at various project stages. In addition to its value for construction management practice, the cognitive framework of construction management body of knowledge can also be useful to inform higher education ( Arditi and Polat, 2010 ; Nguyen et al., 2017 ), professional training, as well as academic and professional research in terms of well-scoped depth and long-term continuous professional development. It is therefore considerate to develop a cognitive framework of BOK for the construction management profession.

Cognitive Domains

The structure of CMBOK, as one particular focus of this article to promote an initiative development for the whole construction management profession, can be outlined by using related cognitive domains, also called knowledge areas or domains, as structural elements of professional knowledge for the framework. For the structure of CMBOK, it therefore becomes critical to define its cognitive domains and their contents in order to establish such a framework of professional knowledge.

The definition of cognitive domains relies on a comprehensive coverage to both explicit and tacit knowledge ( Dalkir, 2017 ), which is required for quality services in specific professional areas such as civil engineering, construction management, and project management, respectively. One particular effort to identify all cognitive domains relating to construction management is to review possible ones adopted in existing BOKs such as CEBOK ( ASCE, 2008 , 2019 ) and PMBOK ( PMI, 2016 , 2017 ) and to make holistically consolidated connections to construction management profession. In the meantime, the review needs to incorporate a thorough consideration on work procedure such as the Plan of Work ( RIBA, 2013 ) with regard to interconnections among identified cognitive domains; moreover it is always necessary to incorporate learning from the best practice in CM. At the initial stage of CMBOK development, as described here, a technical review into the two existing BOKs was conducted through a comprehensive comparison between them and this comparison study can help to develop the CMBOK framework at initial stage.

The sources of knowledge are critical for the establishment and justification of a dependable cognitive framework of professional knowledge. Two reference knowledge frameworks including CEBOK ( ASCE, 2008 , 2019 ) and PMBOK for construction management ( PMI, 2016 ) are recommended for both the structure and contents development of CMBOK. Through the author's initial study on an outline structure of CMBOK, a preliminary framework of 18 cognitive domains under 3 management domains is put forward in Table 2 . This preliminary main structure was developed in comparison with the two highly relevant cognitive frameworks, i.e., CEBOK and PMBOK for CM, respectively, and through evidence based learning from various sources, including:

• Standard industrial classifications such as the UK Standard Industrial Classification of Economic Activities ( ONS, 2009 ),

• Databases run by both professional bodies, including the ASCE Civil Engineering Database and the ICE Virtual Library, and professional publishers, including Elsevier, Emerald, McGraw-Hill, Sage, Springer, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley, etc.,

• Books published in construction management by world-renowned scholars,

• Professional reports by top construction management organizations such as high-ranked main construction contractors ( EMAP, 2017 , 2018 ; ENR, 2018 ),

• Degree programmes accredited by professional bodies such as the American Council for Construction Education ( ACCE, 2017 ), the Chartered Institute of Building ( CIOB, 2018a ), and the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors ( RICS, 2018 ), and

• The author's extensive observations on site and online in relation to construction management for numerous projects worldwide.

Table 2 . Cognitive domains of professional BOK.

The 18 cognitive domains proposed as the preliminary main structure of CMBOK (see Table 2 ) are divided into three categories in terms of management domains, including People/Workforce, Product/Production, and Processes, which are consistent with the three generic management domains identified through the author's extensive review on five main management theories (see Figure 1 ). The incorporation of the three management domains into structuring CMBOK here is based on the following considerations:

• CM practices are well-guided and supported by generic management theories,

• The development of CM theories is based on both management science and professional practices,

• The three management domains can provide an extensive coverage to CMBOK related issues in not only professional practices, but also education, training, research and development, and

• The need for and potentials of further research and development to sustain dependable CM services for the sustainable built environment.

Details about how the preliminary main structure of CMBOK (see Table 2 ) was defined under these four considerations are describe below in response to the three management domains.

For the management domain on People/Workforce in the case of construction management, four cognitive domains are proposed here for the CMBOK framework, and these include the management of Enterprises in relation to construction organizations, the management of Knowledge to support construction practices, the management of Stakeholders involved in various construction operations, and the management of Workforce to undertake construction activities at both project and non-project scale. The choice and definitions of People/Workforce related cognitive domains for CMBOK are essentials for developing its technical details relating to the constitution and competence of workforce working on either building or infrastructure project at various stages where construction management services are in need.

For the management domain on Product/Production in the case of construction management, seven cognitive domains are proposed here for the CMBOK framework, and these cover the management of construction project at various work stages across the whole life to cover the management of Cost across project life cycle; the management of Design upon interconnected technical outcomes across three stages covering concept design, developed design, and technical design; the management of Engineering solutions during construction, maintenance, repair, refurbishment, decommissioning and demolition; the management of Facilities in terms of relevant professional services at operation stage; the management of Plant at both construction and operation stage, the management of Quality of built assets in construction, maintenance, repair, refurbishment; the management of the use of Resources in relation to key considerations on quality, quantity, and embodied energy, etc. The choice and definitions of Product/Production related cognitive domains for CMBOK are essentials for developing its technical details relating to the physical products and production of buildings and infrastructures that construction management profession can support.

For the management domain of Processes in the case of construction management, seven cognitive domains are proposed for the CMBOK framework cover the management of Communications, the management of Supply network, the use of Management systems for various purposes on either individual issues such as environment, health, quality, safety, and welfare, or all tasks of the entire project; the management of Procurement through sound procedure and effective contract control; the management of Risk and Time at various work stages and scopes across project life cycle; and the management of Changes and Emergency whenever unexpected issues may occur in the whole project life. The choice and definitions of Processes related cognitive domains for CMBOK are essential for developing its technical details relating to a whole range of processes of making the built environment built through construction management services.

In addition to the main structure of CMBOK framework, there is another aspect constituting the entire challenge of developing CEBOK, for which the substructure of the main knowledge framework under the 18 cognitive domains described above needs to be defined. It is the author's consideration that the definition of the substructure system also relies on all knowledge sources identified for the proposed preliminary main structure of CMBOK.

A further review into three key sources of information was conducted to detect whether the 18 cognitive domains proposed as the preliminary main structure of CMBOK could be recognized at a satisfactory level. Table 3 presents a comparison from this review, in support of three sets of key references selected from CIOB, British Standards Institution (BSI), and ISO, respectively.

Table 3 . Recognition of cognitive domains proposed for CMBOK.

The three sets of key references (see Table 3 ) selected for this comparison study include:

• CIOB (2014) Code of practice for project management for construction and development, in harness with several other related publications including the Design Manager's Handbook ( Eynon, 2013 ), CIOB (2015) Time and Cost Management Contract suite, CIOB (2018b) report on Improving Quality in the Built Environment, CIOB (2018c) Guide to Good Practice in the Management of Time in Major Projects, and CIOB (2018d) course on Accident Investigation and Root Cause Analysis.

• BSI (2006) Guide to project management in the construction industry, and

• ISO (2017a) standards for construction, in harness with several other related ISO standards with regard to improving the performance of construction management services, for which relevant issues on quality, productivity, and sustainability, etc. ( Bernold and AbouRizk, 2010 ) need to be dealt with.

It looks from this comparison study that all 18 cognitive domains proposed to structure the CMBOK are well-covered by three sets of key references in terms of various issues in construction management practice. This coverage indicates a good justification associated with the preliminary main structure of CMBOK proposed here. Therefore, the CMBOK framework proposed in Table 2 is recommended for further use to fulfill the gap on the shortage of such a BOK currently available for construction management at various scales in terms of practices, education and training, and research and development.

For CEBOB, in addition to its structure system, it is a continued process supported by professionals to add contents into this structured knowledge system. The contents of CEBOK under an established knowledge structure are gigantic in terms of the amount of knowledge accumulated from long-term practice and research in construction management across industry sectors worldwide. From this point of view, it is ideal to have an international organization to lead the development and maintenance of CMBOK, which can be widely recognized and used for construction management.

Intelligent Construction Management System

The second grand challenge to discuss is the establishment and utilization of intelligence pervasive construction management systems to thoroughly support project-based practices at workplaces across work stages. From the author's point of view, an intelligence pervasive management system is a computer aided management system that incorporates the use of experts' knowledge and artificial intelligence (AI) based on the collection and process of relevant data and information from the real world. With regard to the importance of Industry 4.0, the construction industry is now under rapid transformations to adopt digital technologies that enable innovations in products and processes across the supply chain network, and it has become inevitable to incorporate new concepts driven by digital technologies into traditional management systems such as management information system (MIS) and enterprise management system (EMS) for construction management.

It has been always an inspiring learning experience for the author to look into progresses on research and development in the theory and solutions of AI since he put forward the concept of intelligent methods for construction engineering and management ( Chen and Xu, 1996 ; Xu and Chen, 1997 ). In connection with the fast development of information and communication technologies (ICT) since 1990s, recent research and development in applied AI solutions for enhanced practice in construction management has shown insightful perspectives and effective progressions. For example:

• The use of artificial neural network (ANN) ( Waziri et al., 2017 ) across various predication related issues in construction management,

• The use of knowledge sustained analytic network process (ANP) ( Chen, 2007 ) to evaluate options for informed decision making in construction management, and

• The integration with automation technology to deploy single-task and multi-task robots ( Skibniewski, 1988 ; Castro-Lacouture et al., 2007 ; Bock and Linner, 2016 ; Black and Pettitt, 2018 ) in construction projects.

It has been further emphasized by Blanco et al. (2018) recently regarding the adoption of applied AI in construction management in terms of project planning optimization, constructability justification, materials and inventory management, and risk and safety management; and these applications all demand a systems-based approach ( Briesemeister, 2018 ) to improve the quality and productivity of construction management. It looks that an integrative use of data, information and knowledge (DIK) ( Allee, 1997 ; Walker, 2016 ) is now just in front of the construction management profession, while the DIK set can be collected from either construction projects or construction professionals in dealing with specific issues such as those listed in Table 2 in a more accurate and efficient manner.

In response to the increasing need for comprehensive use for DIK in construction management, a new concept about intelligent construction management system (iCMS) is described below in terms of its concept, purpose and value, conceptual model, and two tier systems. Hopefully this description could be useful for further considerations, discussions, and research and development in this area.

An iCMS is a construction management system aided by AI techniques that can trigger human/rational learning, thinking and acting ( Russell and Norvig, 2010 ) in connection to integrated DIK clusters and their elemental sets (see Table 4 ), which are specifically structured on a spectrum of expected helpfulness to assist the use of human intelligence at an enhanced consistent level in CM practice.

Table 4 . DIK clusters and their elemental sets for CM.

The entire DIK set need to be carefully collected with continuous updating manually and/or automatically from various sources under the CMBOK framework, and this ensures the system performs effective practical support connecting with experts' wisdom, which can be derived from computing processes at different scopes covering project/programme level, enterprise/group level, and local/regional level, etc. in a high efficient manner toward excellent professional performance. The iCMS needs to be well-connected with DIK sources covering the management team and a range of databases and knowledge bases to ensure dependable support to construction management practice.

Purpose and Value

The purpose of incorporating an iCMS in practice is to equip the project-oriented management team with dependable technical toolkits for better CM service delivery. The iCMS toolkit aims to facilitate the integrative use of not only expertise and knowledge accumulated from the past practice, but also data and information collected from the on-going project in real time. From the best practice point of view, specific DIK sets are required to deal with critical problems relating to the management of people/workforce, product/production, and processes across project stages.

The value of iCMS for construction management practice is its function to precisely perform calculated decision making support through the effective and efficient use of DIK. This calculation can be made through co-computing processes over a gigantic body of chaotic interactions among workforce, production, and processes within the dynamic project environment across work stages. Therefore, the iCMS is to provide a systematic approach to better using DIK that quantify chaotic interactions in construction projects. In terms of the need for continuous excellent performance across construction management teams, the iCMS is to run through computing systems as an essential smart assistant.

Conceptual Model

A conceptual model of iCMS is illustrated in Figure 2 . The intelligence expected from such a system for construction management can be achieved in its capacity on the integrative use of relevant DIK through a formal work procedure based on individual management systems such as environmental management system ( Chen and Li, 2006 ), health and safety management system ( Griffith, 2010 ), knowledge management system ( Anumba et al., 2005 ), quality management system ( Thorpe and Sumner, 2004 ; Rumane, 2018 ), and project management system ( Chen, 2018 ), etc., which can be dynamically connected inside individual project-oriented computer systems in connections with building information models (BIM) for continued accurate inputs and useful outcomes.

Figure 2 . A conceptual model of iCMS.

This conceptual model illustrated in Figure 2 consists of four functional entities that are connected through DIK and/or supporting procedures, and these entities include CMBOK, CM practices, intelligent CM systems, and AI technologies and other digital technologies.

A two-way connection between entity CMBOK and entity CM Practices is set up to describe their relationship, which covers the two aspects, including:

• CMBOK as a collection of well-structured professional knowledge is to accumulate relevant DIK from CM practices, and the inputs under a given CMBOK structure are collected from CM practices, which covers all individual practices on construction management; and

• CMBOK would influence/support CM practices at various scales through purpose driven application/reuse and/or continuous learning/training based on its classified collections.

For the entity of intelligent CM systems, it has two sub-entities forming an entire tier system, which is described in the next section. This entity is integrated with three other entities in the following ways:

• CMBOK provides the structure and contents of DIK for individual intelligent CM systems,

• CM Practices can be assisted/supported through the use of individual intelligent CM systems, and

• AI technologies and other digital technologies are adopted to support individual intelligent CM systems with expected functions.

It is anticipated that this conceptual model can be useful to clarify the concept of iCMS and its research and development toward intelligent construction management.

Tier Systems

Exploratory research facing grand challenge on intelligence systems for construction management can be conducted through two stages, including the initial stage on sub-systems, i.e., individual management systems, and the secondary stage on an entire iCMS system, i.e., an integration of all its elemental sub-systems. They are called Tier 1 systems and Tier 2 systems, respectively, here based on different functions that individual systems can provide. Generally speaking, Tier 1 systems are sub-sets of Tier 2 systems. The research and development of the two types of systems highly rely on thorough system analysis and design, reliable inputs, and effective use of DIK within the system to support usages in construction management upon various issues and situations. A brief description about the two types of systems is given below for discussion toward further actions in research and development.

Tier 1 systems: Individual intelligent management systems. These systems are designed, developed and implemented for construction management in specific areas as listed in Table 2 . For example, the system for purposes on managing people/workforce, product/production, and processes, respectively, could be:

• An intelligent EMS for managing people/workforce involved in construction projects or project enterprise at various levels in an organization of either clients' or contractors',

• An intelligent cost/quality management system for managing product/production targeted by either an organization of clients' through the investment into their capital projects, or an organization of contractors' through the delivery of entrusted construction projects, and

• An intelligent information and communication management system for managing processes deployed within an organizational environment of construction projects on either clients' or contractors' side.

The intelligent functionality and capability of these individual management systems need to be casted by incorporating a number of interconnected inputs on DIK under the CMBOK framework. There have been initiatives in research and development in Tier 1 systems. For example, Grahovac and Devedzic (2010) presented an expert system to support decision making in cost management; although it was not for construction cost management, their experiment has indicated a promising application of intelligent cost management system in construction, and such an application can be hybrid by incorporating the use of other relevant techniques such as the research that Chou et al. (2015) have conducted by interactively using Genetic Algorithm (GA), ANN, and Case-based Reasoning (CBR) to predict project award price, and this hybrid use of intelligent methods can be further integrated with BIM ( Allplan, 2018 ) for intelligent cost management at various project stages. By learning lessons from other sectors, such as the healthcare sector where it was found that an intelligent cost management system, for example, can leverage relevant data to swiftly identify opportunities so as to achieve savings of $10 per member per month (PMPM) with a conservative calculation ( MedSolutions, 2013 ), it can be anticipated with a positive sensation that the adoption of individual intelligent management systems in construction can significantly improve construction management on various aspects.

According to the concept of iCMS, the use of well-developed practical solutions of AI is essential for Tier 1 systems. In addition to the example given above, it is obvious through literature review that initiatives in research and development in Tier 1 systems have widely developed through the use of AI techniques in natural language processing, knowledge representation, automated reasoning, machine learning, computer vision, and robotics ( Russell and Norvig, 2010 ) for construction management. The following are good examples for Tier 1 systems:

• A natural language processing system to extract precursors and outcomes from unstructured injury reports ( Tixier et al., 2016 ),

• A knowledge extraction and representation system for narrative analysis in the construction industry ( Yeung et al., 2014 ),

• An expert system for crack diagnosis in cast-in-place reinforced concrete structures ( Chen et al., 1999 ),

• A construction noise prediction model based on case-based reasoning in the preconstruction phase ( Kwon et al., 2017 ),

• A machine-learning model for estimating construction costs ( Rafiei and Adeli, 2018 ),

• A computer vision-based workforce activity assessment in construction ( Luo et al., 2018 ),

• A robotic approach to construction waste recycling ( Wang et al., 2019 ).

The adoptions of individual AI techniques in these exploratory research and development have demonstrated the effectiveness of Tier 1 systems to support construction management, and these systems also shows potentials for integration to form a more powerful iCMS toward Tier 2 systems.

Tier 2 systems: Integrated intelligent management system. In principle, an integration of several individual Tier 1 systems can be further developed by using groupware (collaborative software) technology to form collaboration systems ( Nunamaker et al., 2014 ), and this integration is expected to enable more functional intelligent construction management system. From a conceptual point of view, the integration of selected Tier 1 systems can yield one Tier 2 system that can support construction management activities in a transdisciplinary way in multiple functional areas covered by Tier 1 systems, respectively. There are different levels of system integrations, for example, it can be either an integration of several individual Tier 1 systems for project-specific intelligent management based on individual contracts with clients, or the integration of all individual types of Tier 1 systems to form all-round intelligent management for general use by main contractors. In other words, for a bespoke iCMS, the scope of system integration may reflect the scope of construction management contract for which the system is expected to work for in specific projects. On the other hand, there is another type of Tier 2 systems, for example, the i-Construction system ( STI, 2017b ), which is developed as an entire system with sub-systems to perform designed functions for generic use to support CM activities across all types of projects. In comparison with groupware integration that satisfy specific needs for construction management at suitable workplaces in the project environment, the new development of an entire intelligent system faces more challenges in terms of the incorporation of complex sub-systems and human intelligence with thorough connections to CMBOK and DIK in a general way to make enable all necessary functions for construction management.

There are specific issues to be dealt with in the research and development for iCMS. For example, it is essential to not only sufficiently describe DIK and sources for collection, but also accurately collect and effectively use them in order to make the system useful. By learning lessons from construction management practice in relation to the use of computer systems such as a BIM system, for which a comprehensive collection of relevant data and information from construction stage may not be typically well-functioned inside the system and consequently leave data gaps less filled across design, construction and operation stage. Therefore, a set of essential questions and answers under systematic considerations connecting to multiple disciplines within construction projects may help system design, development and usage.

Digital Innovations

The third grand challenge to discuss is the digital innovation throughout its project-oriented work procedure. The need for and demand on innovative reengineering ( Love and Li, 1998 ) in construction management has progressively emerged and increased through the requirement and provision of dependable management services in the construction sector. In the meantime, the availability of advanced technical solutions in sciences and technologies has greatly supported (with huge potentials) the technical enhancement of construction management by incorporating interdisciplinary digital innovations. The discussion here focuses on adopting advanced technologies in relation to the theories and solutions of informatics and automation for further development in construction management.

Construction Informatics

Construction informatics is the interdisciplinary science of the application of advanced computing and ICT to construction engineering and management. The adoption of technical solutions based on ICT driven research and development has been significantly increasing in construction management over the past several decades. For example, technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), artificial reality (AR), which is the author's term to cover virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR), BIM; geographic information systems (GIS), global positioning system (GPS), management information system (MIS), and process simulation (PS) etc. have all been applied in research and development for practice enhancement in management on people/workforce, products/production and processes in building and infrastructure projects. Table 5 makes a summary of exemplar research and development initiatives focused on adopting various digital innovations for construction management through research and development. These initiatives were identified from not only relevant strategies and practices by top international construction contractors, including Balfour Beatty, Bechtel, Kajima, Laing O'Rourke, and Skanska, but also some representative academic research published in China, European Union, UK, and USA.

Table 5 . Exemplar R&D initiatives on construction informatics.

These technical innovations have demonstrated anticipated results such as significantly improved work efficiency via multidisciplinary construction information management although there are still potentials for further research and development in terms of system functionality and interoperability. On the other hand, it is also necessary for interdisciplinary digital innovation to incorporate useful ideas from various professions relating to project management. For example, it is an unresolved question regarding how the incorporation of economics, psychology and sociology ( Harty, 2005 ; Winch, 2009 ; Mascia, 2012 ; Walker, 2015 ) focusing on the performance of individuals and project team into ICT systems for construction management can make further technical enhancement. Further interdisciplinary digital innovations through the use of theory and techniques in construction informatics may therefore need to consider both tangible and intangible aspects within project environment and related scenarios.

From a research and development point of view, there are a number of areas in interdisciplinary digital innovation for enhanced practice and learning in construction management, and these areas can be connected to the three identified domains (see Figure 1 ) of construction management with regard to innovations in:

• People/Workforce management. For example, DIK collection, analysis, and integrative usage,

• Product/Production management. For example, Performance (on Cost, Quality, and Schedule, etc.) modeling, monitoring and assessment, and

• Processes management. For example, Process (for Construction Engineering and Management) reengineering design and coordinated implementation.

In the area of applied AI with regard to the need for alternative research approaches ( AlSehaimi et al., 2013 ) as well as the provision of useful technical solutions, the deep learning technology has indicated a promising future for adoption in order to improve the productivity of construction management professionals, and the technical enhancement needs to be pursued toward accuracies in management in terms of interconnected working efficiency within networked teams to effectively tackle persistent problems relating to major issues on cost, quality and time in project delivery.

Construction Automation

Construction automation is regarded as the use of automatic equipment or machines in construction. The automation technology has been increasingly studied and adopted in the construction sector ( Bock, 2015 ; Chen et al., 2018a ; Hawksworth et al., 2018 ) to improve not only the quality of products but also the efficiency of processes as well as resources use. For construction management, new industrialized construction engineering solutions have been introduced to practices, and these include:

• Design for Manufacturing and Assembly (DfMA) ( BCA, 2016 ),

• Design for deconstruction/disassembly (DfD) ( Rios et al., 2015 ),

• Digital production systems such as 3D printing ( Bechtel, 2018 ; De Laubier et al., 2018 ; García de Soto et al., 2018 ; Skanska, 2018 ),

• Digital data collection and construction verification systems such as drones ( Skanska, 2018 ), and 3D scanning ( Faro, 2019 ),

• Autonomous construction equipment ( Black and Pettitt, 2018 ) and vehicles ( Bechtel, 2018 ), and

• Construction site automation ( Kajima, 2018 ).

These industry led initiatives have shown progressive achievements and new opportunities for lean construction ( Alarcón, 1997 ) toward a wide range of technical enhancements at interdisciplinary scale that integrates construction engineering and construction management across the supply network. For both research and practice to be well-prepared for this disruptive innovation in the construction sector, it is important to learn lessons from the manufacture industry where the automation technology and industrialized automation systems have been very well-developed and widely used in a process of continuous innovations over the past many decades, and this can significantly change the landscape of construction management in terms of professional competence and resources efficiency oriented performance toward the best practice. The adoption of automatic systems in construction projects brings the opportunity for professionals to reconstruct ( Morris, 2013 ) management procedure and associated activities and systems.

For interdisciplinary digital innovation in construction management, it has been learnt from past research and development that both decent deep learning from and efficient DIK sharing in multiple disciplinary areas are necessary and beneficial for a dedicated construction management team; in addition, a fast paced innovation process driven by well-organized collaboration under the Blue Ocean strategy ( Kim and Mauborgne, 2004 ) can be achieved through team-based multi-disciplinary learning, which can foster as well as enable powerful integrations of new digital DIK compounds into existing construction management. For example, the Asta Powerproject ( Elecosoft, 2018 ), which was originally developed for construction planners to develop and maintain project schedules by using the critical path method (CPM) like other same type of software packages for managing construction schedule, has now evolved to be a powerful 4D planning solution by linking project plans made by construction planners to 3D models provided by design engineers so as to match the need for adopting BIM in construction management. The multidisciplinary connection realized in this software package has demonstrated the advantage of further research and development in leading the way forwards. A continuous leadership in research and development is therefore inevitable by providing new solutions on not only Construction Informatics but also Construction Automation, and those innovative digital solution can satisfy new needs for digitalization across various interconnected disciplines within the construction project environment to serve more (wider and deeper) in required management services.

Megaproject Delivery

The fourth grand challenge to discuss is the delivery of megaproject with regard to satisfactory performance toward targets on life-cycle cost, quality of the built environment, resources use, and staged schedule, etc. A megaproject is a large-scale capital project typically costing more than US $1 billion ( PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2014 ), and it can be considered as a subset of major projects which have a wide scope of project costing above US100m for example. Megaproject has its uniqueness in terms of their significant and substantial impacts on social, technical, economic, environmental and political (STEEP) spheres. Generally speaking, these impacts are related to the big set of designed functions and service capacities under the purpose to transform public services and to deliver a robust infrastructure system to serve people and/or the nature in both short and longer term. There have been a huge amount of lessons learnt from past practices on megaproject development and operation across the world. One of the significant and persistent problems in megaproject delivery is the overruns on cost and time against estimated budget and schedule, and this has been widely recognized as specific megaproject risks ( Flyvbjerg et al., 2003 ) and the need for mature risk management ( Jia et al., 2013 ). It is therefore a grand challenge for further research and development to explore better technical solutions that are capable to support significant performance improvement on construction management in megaproject delivery. From this point of view, the description here about the grand challenge in megaproject delivery focuses on two relevant issues, including megaproject knowledge, and knowledge-driven solutions.

Megaproject Knowledge

It is evident through the author's extensive literature review and observations from both research and practices that a new research frontier in megaproject management with regard to scope, contents and potentials in relation to challenges, methodologies and solutions has emerged from a series of initiatives in focused research and practices. Table 6 is used to summarize the author's literature review in relation to megaproject knowledge, and it covers a range of topics about the performance of megaproject delivery. According to this summary, publications from research and practices around the world, especially from world's top economies, have accumulated a quick increase of megaproject knowledge in the past decade, and can strongly foster and support further research and development being embarked on this new frontier for research into megaproject delivery. As summarized in Table 6 , accumulated knowledge for megaproject delivery can be classified in the following four categories of publications to form a new landscape of dedicated research:

• Books on various issues relating to megaproject sustainability with regard to STEEP issues;

• Books on methodological issues about successful megaproject delivery in relation to Decision making, Project finance, Project governance, Project leadership, Multi-stakeholder lessons learned, Project procurement, Management solutions, and Management theories;

• Themed collection of research articles in 12 international journals; and

• Practitioners' learning legacy on megaproject delivery.

Table 6 . Classified publications on megaproject delivery.

The purpose of Table 6 is to develop a knowledge structure in terms of important issues relevant to performance improvement in megaproject delivery. Knowledge materials that were used to establish this structure include books, themed issues of journals, and practitioners' learning legacy. With regard to other types of relevant publications such as numerous individual articles published in journals and newspapers, in addition to case oriented study, a further review and collection can be conducted to verify and improve this structure, to enrich the collection of knowledge materials, and to incorporate megaproject knowledge into CMBOK. As it is always important to use DIK in both effective and efficient way in construction management practice, one challenge in front of further research and development is inevitably to focus on knowledge-driven solutions, which are expected to provide well-informed decision making support in areas relating to construction management. For megaproject, due to the scale and complexity of management, the value and power of structured knowledge reuse are expected and in need for proofs from future practices.

Knowledge-Driven Solutions

Knowledge-driven solutions refer to techniques and tools that can facilitate an effective and efficient use of knowledge in dealing with questions or problems in management practices. For megaproject delivery, it is assumed that one possible solution to effectively tackle the problem on overruns within an enlarged project scale, which is probably beyond the one where traditional theories, techniques and processes can work well for small-size projects, is to deploy significant technical enhancement through the development and enablement of re-engineering-led leadership and capability on various aspects of construction management. In addition to the adoption of digitalized tools to increase productivity at work stages, knowledge-driven solutions that can facilitate a thorough use of DIK in construction management are reckoned to improve the quality of professional services and expected outcomes with regard to contract, legislation, and professional code, etc.; and to increase the momentum that the use of DIK can add into the culture and impacts of construction management enterprises.

Figure 3 is used here as an example to illustrate how knowledge-driven solutions can be crafted for decision making support in a DIK immersive environment of megaproject management. It aims to establish possible connections among five solutions, including:

• Information models such as BIM and CIM to accumulate DIK from stakeholders and site of the megaproject,

• Megaproject case base to store DIK from current and past megaprojects,

• Analytic network process to reuse DIK to identify priorities among project related options,

• Artificial neural network to reuse DIK to derive conclusions for individual project related goals, and

• System dynamics to reuse DIK to predicate possibilities upon specific project related issues.

Figure 3 . Knowledge-driven solutions for megaproject management.

This figure also provides indications about all connections across exemplary solutions to clarify how stakeholders and experts can work together within DIK immersive project environment where various ways of using knowledge are made available and integrated toward better-performed services in construction management.

An example of research into the use of knowledge-driven solutions to deal with the big issue on cost and time overruns in megaproject delivery is the experimental case studies conducted by Boateng et al. (2017) who explored the integrative use of ANP ( Saaty, 1996 ) and system dynamics (SD) ( Sterman, 1992 ) to predict cost and time overruns in the Edinburgh Tram Network project, which has a total capital cost of approximately £776 million ( Cardownie, 2017 ). The outcome from their experiment provided a promising accuracy above 80% in prediction on cost and time overruns, and the simulation method can be interactively used in project management to achieve optimized delivery processes across stages by timely adjusting errors that may cause problems. While it is necessary to reinforce structural and governance arrangements ( Croft et al., 2016 ) in megaproject delivery, this research initiative and outcome is making a suggestion on the necessity to incorporate disruptive technical solutions in megaproject delivery, and has attracted practitioners' interest. As described by Davies et al. (2009) , innovation through process-oriented systems integration by incorporating lean thinking ( Womack and Jones, 1996 ) can significantly improve the performance of megaproject delivery. It is therefore anticipated that disruptive innovations such as the knowledge-driven systems through introducing the usages of new theories and technologies into megaproject management can effectively tackle the persistent problem such as the overruns on budget and schedule, and there is an array of value proposition canvases ( Osterwalder et al., 2014 ) for reconstructing project management ( Morris, 2013 ) toward proactive results through further practice-oriented exploratory research.

Regarding the challenge on megaproject delivery, as it is defined in this article as the one for best practices for which methods described under, the first three challenges need to be used in an integrative way.

Conclusions

This article provides brief discussions on four grand challenges connecting to further research and development in the subject field of construction management with regard to three technical domains on people/workforce, products/production and processes, respectively. In addition to an extensive review into current national/regional strategies for the construction sector in major economies, the four grand challenges were identified through the author's observations on academic research and professional practices in relation to the body of professional knowledge, intelligent management systems, interdisciplinary digital innovation, and megaproject delivery. It is the author's expectation that discussions presented here on the four grand challenges could be useful to inform further research and development at the Frontiers of Construction Management for the dependable built environment.

Contributions

The main contribution of this article is to provide an initial description about four identified grand challenges in construction management together with regard to further research and development under practice oriented strategies at various scales. In order to detail the four grand challenges in relation to leadership development and capability growth for the goals on both dependability and productivity in the provision of construction management services, this article has attempted to clarify four related issues for the advancement of construction management profession, and these include:

• A preliminary structure of cognitive domains of CMBOK,

• The definition with a conceptual model of iCMS,

• A research and development strategy oriented review to further digital innovations under the three knowledge domains of CM, and

• A detailed summary on the structure and tools of using knowledge materials to inform further research and practices for leadership development as well as capability growth in megaproject delivery.

The structure adopted to derive the four grand challenges is generic and could be useful for further discussions on other grand challenges.

Framework and Advantages

The connections among research and development activates across the four grand challenges can form a generic framework to advance the construction management profession. These connections need to include the use of the proposed CMBOK framework as a guideline to develop iCMS, make and perform constant interdisciplinary digital innovations, and conduct improved megaproject management. In return, continuous outcomes and usages of new technical solutions from research and development in iCMS and interdisciplinary digital innovations, as well as megaproject management practice can provide new compounds of CMBOK. The reason for setting up these coherent connections is that it is an essential requirement for such intelligent systems as well as interdisciplinary digital innovations to be both applicable and useful in construction management practices, including those in megaproject delivery. It is therefore an important task for construction management professionals to specify decent connections to CMBOK when a new technical solution is to be developed and adopted. The advantages of using CMBOK framework to guide and connect research and development activities in construction management can be recognized from various sides, and these include standardizations in not only research and development but also professional services, the enrichment of professional knowledge, constant CPD, and extensive interdisciplinary collaborations, etc.

Limitations

This article is based on the author's literature review and observations in construction management, and these were used in discussions on the four grand challenges through qualitative analysis. Although reviewers' comments have hugely helped him to conduct further research in order to illustrate a more vivid landscape with regard to the four identified grand challenges in construction management, there is limited time for him to make the description comprehensive with more details in both qualitative and quantitative way. Further research is inevitably necessary so as to not only describe the four grand challenges in more details, but also identify more technical challenges inside different scopes so as to pursue excellent professional services in construction management.

Climate change and variability has been giving challenges to construction management professionals around the world over the past century ( Stehr and von Storch, 2000 ). In the pursuit of dependability and productivity of professional services in the life cycle of the built environment, professionals need to have thorough considerations upon constant interactions of complex variables between the built environment and the social environment within the natural environment in both short and longer term. While the four grand challenges discussed in this article were derived from a literature review on current national/regional strategies for the construction industry in world top economies, the author would like to recommend further research and development for long-term competence enhancement in areas relating to the four grand challenges, and these advances include:

• A national/regional CMBOK to support the provision of construction management services in the ear of Industry 4.0, and it can be used to develop relevant standards for construction management,

• Knowledge-driven solutions for thorough use of DIK within an immersive environment for construction management, and

• Techniques and tools for construction management incorporating with site automation, and

• Theories, techniques and tools to tackle overrun problems in megaproject management.

About the Author

The author is specialty chief editor for the Construction Management section of Frontiers in Built Environment. He has relevant experiences accumulated from academic and professional services worldwide since later 1980s. He has engaged in more than 50 funded research projects totalling over £5m from research councils and industry partners in UK and internationally. In collaborations with colleagues worldwide, he has made contributions to more than 200 publications, including more than 50 publications collected on the Web of Science (Researcher ID C-1587-2010), in addition to some other publications collected at ORCID 0000-0003-0212-1140 and Google Scholars. He is member of the management committee of COST Action TU1003 (2011-2015) for research into the effective design and delivery of megaprojects in the European Union. He serves as member at several relevant technical committees, including committees on Airport Planning and Operations, and the CEBOK, respectively, at ASCE, and committees on Facilities Management, and Project, Programme and Portfolio Management, respectively, at BSI.

Author Contributions

The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and has approved it for publication.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

This article is prepared for the launch of the specialty section on construction management at the international open-access journal of Frontiers in Built Environment. The author would like to thank Professor Izuru Takewaki, the Chief Editor of the Frontiers in Built Environment for huge support in developing the specialty section on Construction Management. Ruth Miller, Journal Development Manager; Emily Young, and Sarah Yardley, Journal Development Specialists; and other colleagues at Frontiers have all provided strong support and thorough help in the establishment of this specialty section and its research topics. Special thanks to Nicholas Fraser, former Journal Development Manager at Frontiers, for the development of the new specialty section at initial stage. The author would also like to thank all colleagues on the editorial board as either Associate Editor or Review Editor for their strong support and contributions to the specialty section on Construction Management. The author would like to express special thanks to Dr. Conor Mooney at the Council of Europe Development Bank for his strong support as Associate Editor to the establishment of this specialty section at Frontiers in Built Environment.

The author is deeply grateful to his mentors and colleagues from both academia and industry around the world for their help and giving him great opportunities to learn from them more or less in the past three decades. His learning experience with them are extensive, useful, and inspiring.

The unique opportunity that colleagues at Frontiers give to the author for this article focusing on grand challenges in construction management is huge inspirational for him to rethink about the research and development of construction management for both short and longer term.

This article was finalized at the Royal Society of Edinburgh where the author was attending the IDE (Institute of Demolition Engineers) Scottish Seminar in July 2018. It's an inspiring experience there for the author to further think about fundamental questions and answers in relation to the long-term leadership development and capability growth for considerate construction management to fulfill professional responsibilities on total project-oriented sustainability, which relies on a spur of engineering and management genius to spread enlightenment ideas among professionals so as to provide quality services that can support to create and sustain dependable built environment through project-oriented activities that have minimum adverse impacts to people and the nature.

This article cannot achieve the level of publication without a great amount of very insightful comments from reviewers. The author would like to acknowledge their help to make this publication possible. The author would also like to thank colleagues in the Review Operations Team and the Engineering Production Office at Frontiers for their efficient professional support.

For the specialty section on Construction Management at Frontiers in Built Environment, the author would like to invite colleagues working in either research or practice in related areas to come to share valuable experiences to foster further research and development worldwide. The more contributions from colleagues, the huge impacts that this specialty section can make to the long-term development of the construction management profession at national and international scope.

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Keywords: abductive reasoning, built environment, construction management, body of knowledge, digital innovation, intelligent system, megaproject management

Citation: Chen Z (2019) Grand Challenges in Construction Management. Front. Built Environ . 5:31. doi: 10.3389/fbuil.2019.00031

Received: 20 July 2018; Accepted: 25 February 2019; Published: 02 April 2019.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2019 Chen. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Zhen Chen, [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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Dagenham fire started from materials kept on scaffolding, initial probe suggests

By Carl Brown 2024-09-02T07:48:00+01:00

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Institution of Fire Engineers releases detail of preliminary investigation into huge blaze

The fire that engulfed a Dagenham block may have started from building materials kept on the scaffolding, according to the Institution of Fire Engineers (IFE).

The IFE said “preliminary investigations” suggest the materials’ flammability, along with the scaffolding’s “open, vertical structure” may have accelerated the spread of the fire at the Spectrum Building, which required 40 fire engines and 225 firefighters to put out.

Building safety remediation to replace high-pressure laminate panels was being carried out at the seven-storey building, which has commercial spaces on the ground floor and residential flats above.

How the building looked before the fire

The IFE said buildings under renovation or construction pose “unique fire dangers” that differ from completed and occupied structures.

In a blog post, it said: “Fire protection equipment such as sprinklers and alarms are frequently unavailable during construction, making the building and its surroundings vulnerable to rapid fire spread.

“The use of temporary building materials, the presence of fuels and accelerants and the lack of permanent fire prevention measures all contribute to an increased danger.”

It warned scaffolding can increase the risk of fire by funnelling flames upwards. It also said scaffolding can be used to support combustible materials and can obscure escape routes and access points, while temporary wiring and equipment can become ignition sources if not adequately maintained.

>>See also:  Building Safety Regulator opens investigation into Dagenham fire

>>See also:  The Grenfell Inquiry’s final report: what to look out for

An IFE spokesperson said: “The Dagenham fire demonstrated how these risks could come together to create a rapidly escalating fire that threatens both the building under construction and adjacent properties.”

The fire has also thrown a spotlight on the pace of fire safety remediation work. Official data shows there were 2,331 buildings with unsafe cladding where no remediation work had started as of 31 July.

Deputy prime minister and housing secretary Angela Rayner last week demanded faster progress on making buildings safe , ahead of this week’s publication of the Grenfell Inquiry report.

• building safety

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