Editorial

Citation

(2003), "Editorial", Engineering, Construction and Architectural Management, Vol. 10 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/ecam.2003.28610caa.001

Editorial

This edition of ECAM has six papers. The international distribution is two papers from the USA, two papers from Australia, one paper jointly authored from Canada and the USA and one jointly authored from Australia and Hong Kong.

For ECAM historians this is the first edition with no papers from the UK.

The six papers have taken 14 authors to produce. There is only one single authored paper, two papers have two authors, one paper has three authors and one paper has four. The two papers with authors from different countries represent a phenomenon that is growing. Research is more and more on an international scale.

The papers in this issue are outlined below:

1. 1.

   Abeid and Arditi take forward scheduling and progress control by integrating digital movies, based on time-lapse digital photography, and animation with traditional scheduling techniques. Using the Windows environment they offer a software system to compare "as built" with "as planned" and extend the use of the shared pictures to plan day to day progress in construction activities. The authors present a case study of these techniques that are sure to be developed further and it even holds out the prospect of making planning and scheduling an interesting activity.

2. 2.

   Nassar offers a simulation called C³M representing Construction Contracts in a Competitive Market. It is essentially a bidding game and simulates bidding decisions and is based on a spreadsheet. Like all bidding games it illustrates that the decisions taken are not independent and all interlock with each other. This represents the latest edition to the growing stable of bidding games.

3. 3.

   Duyshart, Walker, Mohamed and Hampson join the recurring campaign to persuade the construction industry that ICTs (information and communication technologies) are underused in the construction industry, that the industry is falling behind other industries (e.g. automotive and aerospace), and that the construction industry has much to gain. The authors have based their investigations on the National Museum of Australia project which was used as a demonstration project. The important lesson was the ICT business model and the authors report on its evaluation and the framework that is provided for use on other projects.

4. 4.

   Wirahadikusumah and Abraham offer a decision making framework for the maintenance and rehabilitation of sewer infrastructure where there is limited data available. The authors hope that this approach will move maintenance and rehabilitation decisions away from a crises based approach to infrastructure management based on life cycle costs. The authors believe that by knowing expected costs and their variables that the sewer asset managers can gain a deeper understanding of life cycle costs of their sewer infrastructure.

5. 5.

   Luu, Ng and Chen return us to the much visited issue of selecting a construction procurement system. The well rehearsed arguments for having a robust selection process on construction procurement systems are again presented and the authors offer their solution. The solution offered is a list of 34 procurement selection parameters (PSPs) and an empirical study to identify the importance and interrelationships of the identified PSPs. The authors report on their selection of PSPs and the empirical study that identifies the interrelations.

6. 6.

   Toakley and Marosszeky's paper reviews the development of the quality movement and its application within the construction sector and it goes on to identify areas which require further research. For a newcomer to the field it provides an interesting review of the literature, although it is light on some reports and documents.

The authors get dangerously close to offering their thoughts on qualitative v. quantitative approaches to the research issues and their further views on this would have been useful.