Many construction organizations have misunderstood the reality that total quality management (TQM) based on continuous improvement requires a commitment to learning and that essentially it is the means to a learning organization. The paper argues that if the construction industry is to improve...

Construction problem solving characterizes much of construction management practice and thus is an important research domain. Nonetheless, research in construction problem solving has not yet crossed the threshold into a mature discipline as there is no universally accepted theory for...

An alternative heuristic method for scheduling repetitive projects in which resources are limited and activities may be executed with multiple modes of resource demands associated with different durations is proposed. Unlike general heuristic methods that separately analyze each competing...

Consultants' fees and technical submissions in two-envelope fee tendering are usually converted to scores. The fee scores and technical (quality) scores are then multiplied by predetermined weightings and aggregated. To preserve the desired influence of the predetermined weightings, the fee...

Very few construction companies and consulting firms in Australia measure their costs of quality. Consequently, it is difficult for them to prove that systems for preventing quality failures are cost-effective. Although the direct costs of a quality system can be quantified with some accuracy...

Rule-based expert systems and artificial neural networks are two major systems for developing intelligent decision support systems. The integration of the two systems can generate a new system which shares the strengths of both rule-based and artificial neural network systems. This research...

A parameterization is found for the covariance structure of observations on ordered pairs of sampling units, leading to a simple closed form likelihood function. This helps to simplify statistical inference for models exhibiting such covariance structure in genetics and psychology.