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The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into the environment, resources and surroundings factors to develop a system dynamic model of dynamic project scheduling that aids on-time project delivery by reducing the project delay for the road construction industry in New Zealand (NZ).

This study adopted narrative inquiry methodology that involved semi-structured interviews (SSI)/expert opinion and systematic literature review (SLR) data to determine the environment, resources and surroundings factors to develop a system dynamic model of dynamic project scheduling that aids on-time project delivery by reducing the project delay for the road construction industry in NZ. The data were analysed by using descriptive analysis, Likert scale and thematic analysis techniques to understand the relationship of these factors to propose a system dynamic model.

This study concludes that weather, pandemic, material, geotechnical and disaster factors highly influence while other factors such as equipment shortage, breakdown, design error, labour and event had mixed impact on the dynamic scheduling (DS) that aids on-time project delivery. The proposed system dynamic model can enhance the understanding of factors affecting DS.

SLR is limited to English literature. The limitations of an SSI and a small sample size are acknowledged.

The proposed model can reduce the uncertainty and scheduling errors during the planning phase and aid in the lesser scheduling modification during the execution phase. In practice, this study will be helpful for road contractors to understand environment, surroundings and resource in-control and out-of-control factors, overcome road construction delays, reduce cost, aid in stakeholder management and sustainable development.

The inclusion of environment, resource and surroundings factors in force majeure clauses will bring an understanding between contracting parties and in turn reduce disputes and delays and help social causes such as on-time infrastructure delivery.

For the first time in a road construction, dynamic project scheduling model that collectively included and linked environment, resource, and surroundings factors to determine the in-control and out-of-control factors for an organisation is proposed. The novelty in the paper is provided by the inclusion of the events, disasters, and pandemics influence on DS in the NZ road construction industry for the first time.

Globally, road projects are notorious for riskiness, which often results in cost overruns. In developing countries, these risks are amplified by economic instabilities and institutional failures. Majority of road projects in these countries are awarded to notedly inept indigenous contractors. Currently, research on the relationship between risks and cost performance of road projects has predominantly focussed on the client’s perspective. Effects of risks on contractors’ cost performance (profit) are inadequately investigated in literature. The purpose of this paper is to determine the relationship between direct risks and cost performance of road projects by indigenous contractors of developing countries from the contractors’ perspective.

The multivariate structural equation modelling technique was used to analyse purposively obtained data from indigenous contractors that recently completed road projects in Nigeria.

It was observed that a significant positive relationship exists between the aggregate project risk, i.e. project risk index of cost (PRIC) and cost performance of the projects. Significant positive relationships were also found to exist between identified cost risk centres and PRIC and between risk factors and cost risk centres. The risk centre site environment and location contributes the most to PRIC.

Indigenous contractors of developing countries are to analyse the identified risk factors and centres prior to bidding for road projects and carefully manage them during project execution.

Future studies of risks in road project should aim to obtain project risk indices of costs for the projects.

Public private partnerships (PPP) projects are characterised by highly leveraged capital structure. Lenders who provide the major portion of financing in the form of debt are more concerned with the downside risks and the measures to mitigate the risks. Lenders, thus, look into the risk factors and mitigating measures that could influence the projects debt servicing capability while making the credit decisions. The purpose of this paper is to identify the various aspects of PPP road projects that lenders look into while making the decisions to extend project finance loans to PPP road projects.

Case study research with four Indian lending institutions provides primary evidences from the interviews on the aspects considered during credit decision making. The primary evidences are collaborated with secondary evidences such as loan proposal and information memoranda of the PPP road projects undertaken by the case study organisations.

The study identifies the various aspects of PPP road projects, categorised into six major dimensions. The aspects and dimensions provide a theoretical framework to measure the risk profile of PPP road projects from debt‐financing perspective.

Additional cases can be undertaken to validate the findings and increase the usefulness of the framework to practitioners and enhance their general application.

The framework can be useful while making debt financing decisions in assessing how desirable the project is from a debt‐financing perspective.

The work is novel providing insights into debt financing of PPP road projects in India and will be of interest to sponsors while structuring the financial package.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the causes of road construction delays in Ghana and identify appropriate mitigation measures.

The initial approach involved an empirical analysis of 48 road projects to quantify the extent of time. This was followed by a survey of the perception of road agency and donor partner officials of the critical causes of road project delays.

About 70 per cent of road projects experience delays and 52 per cent experience cost overruns. The average time overrun and cost overruns of road projects in Ghana was 17 months and US$1.15m (or 22.5 per cent), respectively. The five most critical causes of road construction delays were delay in finance and payment of completed work by owner (client-related); inadequate contractor experience (contractor-related); changes in scope by the owner during construction (client-related); delay to furnish and deliver the site to the contractor (client-related); and inflexible funding allocation for project items (donor-related).

The most critical constraint of this study is the fact that findings are based on only the views of industry professional experts. It may be assumed that despite using broadly used terminology to refer to the causes of project delays, the interpretations by respondents may have differed from those intended. Further research could look at the correlation between time overrun and cost overrun using principle component analysis.

The identified delay factors are not unique to the road sector. From both academic and practical perspectives, the results emphasizes on the need for a holistic and integrated risk management model for the entire construction industry in Ghana.

The paper examined the causes of road project delays in the Ghanaian context and recommended remedial measures.

Determining the duration for road construction projects represents a problem for construction professionals in Ghana. The purpose of this paper is to develop an artificial neural network (ANN) model for determining the duration for rural bituminous surfaced road projects.

Data for 22 completed bituminous surfaced road projects from the Department of Feeder Roads (rural road agency) were collected and analyzed using the principal component analysis (PCA) and ANN techniques. The data collected were final payment certificates which contained payment bill of quantities (BOQ) of work items executed for the selected completed road projects. The executed quantities in the BOQ were the total quantities of work items for site clearance, earthworks, in-situ concrete, reinforcement, formwork, gravel sub-base/base, bitumen, road line markings and furniture, length of road and actual durations for each of the completed projects. The PCA was first employed to reduce the data in order to identify a smaller number of variables (or significant quantities) that constitute 81.58 percent of the total variance of the collected data. The ANN was then used to develop the network using the identified significant quantities as input variables and the actual durations as output variables.

The coefficient of correlation (R) and determination (R²) as well as the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) obtained show that construction professionals can use the developed ANN model for determining duration. The study shows that the best neural network is the multi-layer perceptron with a structure 3-38-1 based on a back propagation feed forward algorithm. The developed network produces good results with an MAPE of 17.56 percent or an average accuracy of 82.44 percent.

Apart from the fact that the sample size was small, the developed model does not incorporate the implications of other likely factors that may affect contract duration.

The outcome of this study is to help construction professionals to fix realistic contract duration for road construction projects before signing a contract. Such realistic contract duration would help reduce time overruns as well as the payment of liquidated and ascertained damages by contractors for late completion.

This paper proposes an alternative way of determining the duration for road construction projects using the total quantities of work items in a final payment BOQ. The approach is based on the PCA and ANN model of quantities of work items of completed road projects.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the payment models and financing structures used for road Infrastructure projects under public private partnerships (PPPs) in the UK. Comparison of funding and financial structures in the selected case studies exposes the risks and values of the models of payment utilised. This research also aims to identify relationships with payment certainty and financing debt restructuring.

The paper compares several case studies representing the evolution of private finance initiative road infrastructure in the UK context. Templates were completed using semi- structured interviews during data collection; and a qualitative content analysis approach was employed for case study analysis.

Lessons learned from using different payment methods show the benefit and limitations of adopting different forms of PPP in road development. Refinancing of projects presents substantial risks to the viability of a project, and benefits gained by the private sector. Further, refinancing brings no significant benefits to the public sector as well.

Performance of selected case studies highlights emerging issues that need to be considered when adopting a PPP procurement route in roads projects. Financial markets have supported these projects under different risk profiles and payment models. They also have the potential to play a greater part in capitalising long-term investment in road projects and increase private sector participation in infrastructure development, generating more competition and innovation.

This paper provides case study comparison and practical implications of recent PPP developments in road provision in the UK and the evolution of public policy in the subject.

The study aims to find the causes of road projects implementation delays in Blantyre, one of the four city councils (CCs) in Malawi.

The study followed a qualitative research approach using a Blantyre City Council (BCC) as a case study. This study combined in-depth, face-to-face interviews with councillors, secretariat staff, consultants, and contractors who worked on the city's road projects. Data gathered were analysed using thematic content analysis. Also, some road project documents were examined.

The findings from the case study revealed the primary cause of road project construction delays as the shortage of engineers in conducting detailed proposed projects surveys resulting in incomplete project scope definition before contractor's procurement. Other identified factors were service providers delaying the removal of existing public utility infrastructure from project sites, client funding issues, scope changes, and client delays in issuing instructions to the contractors during project implementation. Another factor was the shortage of construction equipment and construction materials experienced by some appointed contractors.

Only road construction projects and stakeholders operating from Blantyre city, Malawi, were contacted for the study; thus, the findings may not be generalizable.

There is an urgent need to increase technical employees, especially engineers and other critical technical staff such as quantity surveyors in Blantyre. Employees' conditions of service should be conducive to attract qualified people to undertake effective management and assessment of projects before commencement to identify the feasibility of proposed projects to decrease the rate of road construction project delays.

The study has established Blantyre city's core challenges in implementing its road projects seamlessly and has provided mitigation measures for dealing with the shortcomings.

Public‐private partnerships (PPPs) are being frequently used today to private sector investment in road projects. Most of the road PPP projects are either for new roads or for those that involve significant expansion of existing capacity. There are limited instances of PPPs for renovating and maintenance of existing roads. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the applicability of using PPPs for road renovation and maintenance projects.

This paper uses a case‐study approach since it is an appropriate strategy to investigate a phenomenon within its real life context. The East Coast Road project was chosen for the study because it was the first project in India to use PPP for road renovation and maintenance, and being the first project of its kind, the case was of general public interest.

The paper indicates that risk levels in Rehabilitate, Improve, Maintain, Operate and Transfer (RIMOT) projects are lower than Greenfield BOT projects. Even in areas like renovation and maintenance, PPP structures can bring many advantages over traditional procurement.

This paper has the limitations attributable to single case studies. There is a need to extend this paper to include more such case studies to evaluate their relevance for infrastructure development, particularly in emerging countries.

PPP structures can be useful for renovating and maintaining the existing roads. Modalities such as the RIMOT framework can have greater potential than the conventional BOT structures. Private investments in infrastructure can also be through a corporate finance structure.

This paper describes and analyzes the experience of India's first PPP for renovation and maintenance. The findings of this paper would have value for policy makers who are interested in attracting private sector finance and expertise in infrastructure and more specifically in roads.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the problems faced by banks, lenders, financial institutions, public authority, developers and concessionaires in course of financing of public–private partnership (PPP) road projects. Subsequently, the reasons that contribute to these problems were analyzed to come up with recommendations for mitigation of these problems.

The methodology adopted is based on identification of financing problems and the reasons thereof, from a systematic and critical review of literature. Financing details including problems faced and reasons behind were extracted from details of one port, one airport and one road project. Data pertaining to financing of PPP road projects have been collected for completed (five projects) as well as projects under implementation (five projects) during a time interval of four months, starting from December 2018 to March 2019. The chosen three projects for case studies were executed in airport project at Kolkata in four years, offshore container terminal at Mumbai port in six years and Tuni Ankapali road project in three years. This period attains importance, as simultaneous progressive development and innovation in the PPP mode of project execution was taking place rapidly.

The commercial banks in India dominate in providing debt to the PPP infrastructure projects, especially in the road sector. The non-banking financial companies and other intermediaries were still in their infancy then, and a corporate bond market was growing steadily, though slowly. Financing problems faced by the developers resulted in unwarranted time and cost overruns emanating from delay in land acquisition and grant of approvals, with these being the two major barriers to private sector participation. Even schedule overrun finally resulted in increased construction and financing cost.

Demand for upgradation, building and expansion of transportation infrastructure (roads) exists to keep pace with economic development. Problems like lack of a developed market for financing, inadequate institutional capacity, lack of personnel having domain expertise and absence of exclusive legislation to govern the implementation of PPP road projects are encountered by the sponsors and developers. Delay in land acquisition and environment clearance inhibits any decisive action by the lenders and investors, as these two are integrally linked to the decisions to be taken with respect to the financing of projects. Investors and bankers are generally apprehensive of their investment getting locked in or ending up as non-performing assets. Identification and proposed mitigation of these problems may likely smoothen the rough edges for the financing of projects, resulting in smoother implementation.

This research aims to evaluate the status of project management best practices in the road infrastructure sector of Ghana through the inquiry of project managers’ competency.

Based on a thorough literature review on competency and project management best practices, a criterion for measuring best practices based on the competencies was identified. Using closed-ended questionnaires as a survey instrument, data was collected and analyzed using a one-sample t-test, Kendall’s concordance coefficient and simple regression.

The key finding reveals that in achieving project management best practices for the Ghanaian road infrastructure projects, project managers should straighten and strengthen their capability in terms of skills, personal characteristics and knowledge as ranked. An appropriate blend of these characteristics would be a necessary requirement for project managers. Through this, project managers and project-based road infrastructure organizations will be able to win the confidence of their stakeholders and attain improvements in cost-effectiveness, quality and time management.

This study provides project managers in the road infrastructure sector with relevant information on which criteria and variables are critical and are frequently required to manage such projects. This will be helpful for training programs and professional development of project managers in the road infrastructure sector.

The study provides a new direction and focuses for project managers in the road infrastructure industry toward best project management practices in developing countries. It also complements existing studies in this area which deepen the understanding of the subject area.