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The paper aims to identify the effective constructability methods and tools that should be applied during the early project design stages to prevent specific constructability failures regarding project context.

Seventeen basic constructability problems were defined, 12 constructability implementation methods for investigation were selected, and a general tool representing potential causal connections between the problems and the methods that could prevent them was developed. A comparative case study was conducted through a rigorous investigation of the construction documentation of four major building construction projects. Nearly four hundred constructability problems were identified. The tool developed was used to draw conclusions about the preferred constructability methods, in general, and with respect to specific project contexts.

The managerial approach offers the best methods for preventing constructability problems. The major methods that emerged were (1) assigning a constructability champion, (2) facilitating the involvement of the general contractor early in the design process, and (3) augmenting design quality control. At the other end of the scale, methods such as company procedures and owner involvement were found to be the least effective.

The paper offers the ability to relate constructability problems to preventive mechanisms and to identify the appropriate steps to be taken to resolve these problems. The mechanism described here can be used by construction companies that keep failure data within accounting files to check projects in retrospect and draw lessons from them to be implemented in future projects.

Constructability is a system for achieving optimum integration of construction knowledge in the building process and balancing the various project and environmental constraints to achieve maximisation of project goals and building performance (CII Australia 1993). Constructability concepts and principles, considered during conceptual planning, design, procurement, construction and use, can make the total building process easier to manage, quicker and more cost effective. When constructability becomes an implied and accepted aspect of the total building process it has the potential to deliver real benefits to clients, consultants, contractors and users. Constructability practices have developed from application and a considerable body of research conducted over the last thirty years. This paper reviews the development of constructability concepts and the identification of the key principles of constructability, and identifies the likely future developments in constructability research and practice. Historically, the attention given to constructability has been somewhat narrowly focused on individual project stages, and therefore, the multi‐dimensional aspects of constructability have not been fully considered and the real benefits may have been missed. The findings presented in this paper indicate that the construction industry has begun to address more purposefully the concerns and difficulties of actively managing the interface between the various stages of the building process in addition to considering the facets of the individual stages themselves. In this way, constructability is becoming an important and powerful concept which can be applied beneficially to the total building process.

This paper is aimed at identifying the common approaches for improving constructability and evaluating their effectiveness of implementation.

A comprehensive survey has been carried out on contemporary literature, i.e. from 1990 onwards, to trace the development of the buildability and constructability concepts and the common approaches of improvement.

Results show that buildability is mainly concerned with design, quality of built products, ease of construction, as well as efficient and economical construction. Constructability emphasises integration of construction knowledge and experience at various project stages; optimisation of different project requirements to achieve overall goals; and ease of construction. Therefore, “constructability” embraces the concept of “buildability”. The implementation of Quantified Assessment, Constructability Review and Constructability Programmes are the three commonly adopted approaches.

Improvement measures should be implemented at the design stage, whereas improved constructability would eventually bring about tangible benefits in terms of time, cost, quality and safety. The Quantified Assessment approach appears to be the most practicable way of improving constructability.

Up till now, there have been very limited studies providing an evaluation of different approaches for improving constructability. The study has offered an insight into the commonly adopted improvement measures, highlighting proven success cases, hence enabling effective strategies to be developed for enhancing constructability.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the process, and analyse the implementation of constructability improvement and innovation result during the planning and design for seawater intake structure of fertilizer plant project.

The research methodology approach is case study method at the project level. This constructability improvement process was investigated by using constructability implementation checklists, direct observation, documented lessons learned analysis and key personnel interviews.

The case study shows that the implementation of constructability during planning and design stage for this seawater intake structure has increased the project performance as well as improved the schedule by five months (14.21 percent) and reduced the project cost by 15.35 percent.

This case study was limited to three previous seawater intake projects as references and one new method seawater intake structure at a fertilizer plant project.

A constructability improvement checklist using theory and lessons learned for the specific construction project was documented.

The findings support the relevant study of constructability and provide specific lessons learned for three previous projects and one of the new methods of the construction project and which are documented by the company.

Contractors’ personnel play a prominent role in enhancing the constructability of facilities design, construction and assessment. Looks at the constructability concepts identified by the Construction Industry Institute at Austin, Texas (CII) and represents and describes the constructability concepts in relation to contractors’ personnel. Discusses the role of each of them in enhancing constructability of facilities projects. Concludes that a set of obligations are the answer to the question of “How can the contractor’s personnel enhance the project constructability?”.

Design details are not always simple and easy to understand. Builders may spend considerable time on interpreting difficult or complex details in a drawing; this could result in constructability problems. Advanced computer visualisation tools offer good visualisation capabilities that cannot be achieved using traditional tools, such as 2‐D drawings. They provide considerable potential to improve this process in construction and can effectively be used for communication between design and construction teams that are geographically dispersed. However their use is still at present limited and not fully understood. This paper presents an industry survey on the use of computer visualisation to communicate design information as part of a research study, which aims to demonstrate how computer visualisation can be used in clarifying design details and in dealing with constructability problems. The analysis of the results shows that the most common methods used by designers and site teams for clarifying information on constructability problems were traditional tools and methods, which have serious limitations in supporting virtual construction project teams. It also shows that traditional tools are not adequate to communicate design information related to constructability between designers and builders.

The engineer’s personnel play a prominent role in enhancing the constructability of facilities design, construction and assessment. This paper is based on the constructability concepts identified by the Construction Industry Institute (CII) at Austin, Texas and represents and describes the constructability concepts in relation to the engineer’s personnel. It discusses the role of each of them in enhancing constructability of facilities projects. A set of obligations has been concluded as an answer to the question of "How can the engineer’s personnel enhance the project constructability?".

This study aims to develop a constructability index (CI) that can ease the construction activities in a project based on the contractors’ experience and resources. The proposed CI is a vital decision support tool that quantifies the difficulty level for the contractor to execute certain activities with the contingency of other project elements. The virtual reality (VR) technology was used to provide additional data, communicate the contingency impact of other project elements on specific activities and provide sequential execution data to the contractors. This can minimize the risk of not being able to execute various activities on time and within the budget.

The VR-based CI was developed through two steps. Step 1 was to identify the factors affecting constructability by exploring the literature and consulting local construction experts. These factors were then organized through a hierarchy of main factors and subfactors and validated by local experts through predesigned surveys. The factors were classified into VR dependent or non-VR independent, and their relative weights were calculated using the analytical hierarchy process along with their reliability, which was determined using Cronbach’s alpha approach. Step 2 was to define the attributes for the constructability factors defined in Step 1 using the Multi Attribute Utility Theory to quantify the contractor’s compliance level of these factors by giving them the appropriate score. The utility factors for the VR-independent factors were obtained through standards, literature and local surveys, and they were quantified on a 1–10 scale. However, the VR-dependent factors were given their corresponding scores using the developed VR navigation environment generated by integrating Autodesk Revit and Navisworks software. Accordingly, the CI for each activity was evaluated, and the overall CI for the project was calculated by aggregating the CIs for all activities.

The developed CI quantifies the contractor’s ability to execute construction projects and addresses the lack of communication and coordination between the various construction units in the planning phase itself. Moreover, it can resolve possible hard (physical) and soft (time) construction clashes and minimize their impacts on project schedule and budget. Among the relative weights of the identified factors, prefabrication of building components was found to have the highest effect on constructability. Furthermore, applying the developed VR-CI, a real project showed that the utility values of the main factors quantified on a ten-point scale were between 6 and 9, which means routine supervisions and monitoring are required.

Though the concepts of constructability and VR have been used in different contexts, their integration to develop a comprehensive CI for the building construction industry is a unique contribution, which has not been reported previously.

Discusses the issue of developing a project design that adequately addresses the practicality of delivering integrated construction knowledge and experience in planning, engineering, procurement and field operations. There are few practical examples in the literature that explain how non‐traditional construction project procurement approaches can be utilised to organise an integrated project management system incorporating occupational health and safety (OHS), environmental management (EM) and quality management (QM) systems. Reports on a case study that helps fill that gap. Shows how the adoption of a design and construct procurement approach, together with appropriate management techniques, on a successful major freeway project in Melbourne, Australia, was driven by a sound construction planning process, and integrated the construction planning system with OHS, EM and QM systems.

This study aims at improving the constructability of design solutions by inte grating site construction problems, which are related to the design, with the design's main functions. A full process analysis was carried out on the design functions of concrete framed office buildings whereby site problems were traced back to the relevant design stages. Design processes that significantly contribute to these problems were highlighted, along with their data flows. An object‐oriented analysis (OOA) method was then applied to model those processes. Proceedings through the five major activities of Coad & Yourdon's OOA method, a complete OOA model was developed. This technique has proved to be very effective in producing a well structured data model with the consequence of being easily mapped into an object‐oriented development environment. An integrated object‐oriented system was also developed, which attempts to use essential design information, at an early stage of the design process, to improve the constructability of the design.