Special Issue "Project Management for Sustainable Construction"

A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Sustainable Engineering and Science".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 1 January 2022.

Special Issue Editor

Prof. Dr. Pramen P. Shrestha
E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Civil and Environmental Engineering and Construction Department, University of Nevada Las Vegas, Las Vegas, NV 89154, USA
Interests: sustainable project management; construction materials; construction management; project delivery methods; asset management

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The use of sustainable construction practices is critical to reduce adverse impacts on climate change and environmental degradation. The construction, operation, and demolition of building and infrastructure projects has contributed to air, noise, and water pollution, and has generated landfill waste. In the last decade, construction project participants (owners, designers, contractors, and facility managers) have been developing sustainable construction management practices to decrease the level of this pollution to make the Earth more livable. Therefore, the purpose of this Special Issue is to collect the regulatory, design, construction, operation, maintenance, and demolition management practices that have been used by project participants in order to reduce their impact on climate change.

This Special Issue focuses on the various project management practices used by the project participants throughout the life-cycles of construction projects to make them environmentally sustainable. This includes practices used to increase sustainability that are related to environmental rules and regulations, planning, project delivery selection, contract procurement, design management, construction, operation, maintenance, and demolition. In addition, the construction materials and methods used to make building and infrastructure projects more sustainable will be addressed in this Special Issue. This Issue will also focus on dispute resolution and claim management practices related to sustainable construction. The main purpose of this Issue is to provide a body of knowledge related to sustainable construction management practices to owners, designers, contractors, and facility managers.

Prof. Dr. Pramen P. Shrestha
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All papers will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1900 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • sustainable construction
  • sustainable materials
  • sustainable project delivery methods
  • sustainable procurement methods
  • dispute resolution processes in sustainable construction
  • green buildings

Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

Article
Construction Disputes and Associated Contractual Knowledge Discovery Using Unstructured Text-Heavy Data: Legal Cases in the United Kingdom
Sustainability 2021, 13(16), 9403; https://doi.org/10.3390/su13169403 - 21 Aug 2021
Viewed by 329
Abstract
Construction disputes are one of the main challenges to successful construction projects. Most construction parties experience claims—and even worse, disputes—which are costly and time-consuming to resolve. Lessons learned from past failure cases can help reduce potential future risk factors that likely lead to [...] Read more.
Construction disputes are one of the main challenges to successful construction projects. Most construction parties experience claims—and even worse, disputes—which are costly and time-consuming to resolve. Lessons learned from past failure cases can help reduce potential future risk factors that likely lead to disputes. In particular, case law, which has been accumulated from the past, is valuable information, providing useful insights to prepare for future disputes. However, few efforts have been made to discover legal knowledge using a large scale of case laws in the construction field. The aim of this paper is to enhance understanding of the multifaceted legal issues surrounding construction adjudication using large amounts of accumulated construction legal cases. This goal is achieved by exploring dispute-related contract terms and conditions that affect judicial decisions based on their verdicts. This study builds on text mining methods to examine what type of contract conditions are frequently referenced in the final decision of each dispute. Various text mining techniques are leveraged for knowledge discovery (i.e., analyzing frequent terms, discovering pairwise correlations, and identifying potential topics) in text-heavy data. The findings show that (1) similar patterns of disputes have occurred repeatedly in construction-related legal cases and (2) the discovered dispute topics indicate that mutually agreed upon contract terms and conditions are import in dispute resolution. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Project Management for Sustainable Construction)
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Article
Developing and Applying a Model for Evaluating Risks Affecting Greening Existing Buildings
Sustainability 2021, 13(11), 6403; https://doi.org/10.3390/su13116403 - 04 Jun 2021
Viewed by 609
Abstract
Improving building performance through reducing negative environmental impacts can be achieved by greening existing buildings (GEB), which is considered a very important sustainability process. Due to the risky and uncertain nature of the process of GEB, a growing amount of attention should be [...] Read more.
Improving building performance through reducing negative environmental impacts can be achieved by greening existing buildings (GEB), which is considered a very important sustainability process. Due to the risky and uncertain nature of the process of GEB, a growing amount of attention should be given to eliminating the effects of risks on GEB. This research aims to identify most expected risk factors related to GEB, as well as to evaluate their effects through calculating risk factor characteristics, such as risk factor presence (RFP), impact on the GEB process (IGEB), and impact on building performance in the long run (IBP), as new indices describe these risks. Sixty-six risk factors were categorized in seven risk groups related to the economic aspect, social aspect, environmental aspect, managerial aspect, sustainability operation, sustainable design, and renovation. Moreover, a fuzzy model for risk analysis was developed to combine the multi-effects of the aforementioned three risk factor characteristics in one index representing the risk factors’ overall importance. The model was applied and verified for data collected in Saudi Arabia. The results of this study showed that the most important risk group is the greening process of environmental control, while the least important is the greening process of renovation and construction. Using the proposed model improved the results of evaluating risks affecting GEB through merging the multi-effects of risk factor characteristics. The results and analysis proved that the most important key risk factors were environmental in nature. An intricate relationship of the impacts on the GEB process and building performance with the overall importance of the risk factors was clearly found. The decision makers who deal with greening projects in Saudi Arabia should be aware of the key risks identified in this study. The proposed methodology and model can be easily applied to other countries to help decision makers in evaluating their GEB projects, as well as comparing more greening projects based on risk analysis. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Project Management for Sustainable Construction)
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