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A literature review is presented in the subject of construction plant and equipment management (CPeM) to: delineate the subject; consider its development over recent years; and identify principal themes within it. The paper aims to close the gap in knowledge, by using these objectives as a mechanism to observe how research themes relate to primary CPeM functions, and to suggest future research direction.

A thematic review of CPeM academic literature (in the main, refereed journal papers published in English‐speaking countries over the last decade) is undertaken; the nature of identified themes is discussed, for instance, regarding why they might have evolved as they have; and based on the foregone, themes for future research in the field are proffered.

CPeM is found well established within the broader subject of construction management. Eight principal themes are identified, namely plant maintenance; downtime and productivity; optimisation; robotics and automation; health and safety; operators and competence; machine control; and “miscellaneous”.

It is proffered that based on informational/technological advancements coupled with growing environmental/financial pressures, future CPeM research will strive to facilitate even greater plant reliability and safer modes of working. It is suggested that “optimum production methods” and “minimal resource consumption” will become inherent theme goals.

This is the first time that CPeM research has been consolidated and reviewed for publication in this manner.

The purpose of this paper is to glean leadership lessons of megaproject managers through the life stories of four purposefully selected managers from two contemporary and two landmark megaprojects.

A narrative inquiry approach applying thematic analysis is used to capture lessons learnt from these stories with a focus on leading megaprojects. Narrative analysis has been used in organization studies and this paper is an attempt to use it in project management research.

Common strategies used by all four megaproject managers to be successful include: selecting the right people and building their capability; building trust with stakeholders; dealing with institutional power and politics effectively; and having the courage to innovate. There were also some differences in the approaches used by these managers due the times in which these projects were implemented.

The use of narrative inquiry is new to project management literature. As the life stories were not presented in the same way it was difficult to analyze them in the same manner, and further data had to be collected. This could have been avoided if it were feasible to collect narratives directly from the megaproject managers. This is being planned in future research emerging from this paper.

This study helps megaproject managers to exhibit leadership attributes that would be required to execute such large complex projects that have wide implications for the society, economy and the environment.

Megaprojects are often considered major displacements that cause social and geophysical issues that affect the environment. Lessons learnt from these stories could be useful to avoid such issues. The stories analyzed showed the human side of the megaproject managers toward people related, health and societal issues.

Narrative inquiry is new to project management literature. In the past, project management literature has focused on extracting lessons learnt from historical and classical projects, but lessons from life stories of project managers have not been used for the same purpose.

The purpose of this paper is to develop an effective numerical approach to assess the nonlinear dynamic responses of a near‐bed submarine pipeline.

A coupled numerical approach is proposed in this paper to assess the nonlinear dynamic responses of this pipeline. The boundary‐element method is first used to get the nonlinear dynamic fluid loading induced by the asymmetric flow. The meshless technique is used to discretize the structure of the pipeline. A numerical example is first presented to verify the effectivity of the present method. Then, the coupled technique is used to simulate the nonlinear dynamic fluid‐structure interaction problem of a near‐bed pipeline. A Newton‐Raphson iteration procedure is used herein to solve the nonlinear system of equations, and the Newmark method is adopted for the time integration.

The presence of seabed results in a large negative lift on a pipeline in a horizontal current. Studies reveal that there exists a critical current velocity, above which the pipeline will become instable, and the critical velocity is significantly affected by the initial gap from the pipeline to the seabed.

The near‐bed submarine pipeline is a widely used structure in marine engineering. This paper originally develops a numerical approach to model this special fluid‐structure interaction problem. It has demonstrated by the examples that the present approach is very effective and has good potential in the practical applications.

The purpose of this paper is to research the hardened properties of non-dispersible concrete in seawater environment, especially in seawater environment.

The main approach is according to the experiment.

The findings of this paper are: first, because of the washing effect of water, the strength of underwater non-dispersible concrete is lower than that of terrestrial concrete. Second, the strength of non-dispersible underwater concrete with silica fume increases remarkably at different ages. Third, underwater non-dispersible concrete does not produce new products when it is formed and cured in seawater.

In this paper, underwater non-dispersible concrete is formed and maintained on land, freshwater and seawater by underwater pouring method. The working performance, mechanical properties and durability of underwater non-dispersible concrete mixtures after hardening are tested.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the durability of underwater non-dispersible concrete in seawater environment.

In this paper, ten groups of underwater non-dispersible concrete mixtures were designed, and the anti-dispersibility and fluidity of the mixtures were tested.

The durability test analysis shows that different pouring methods have different effects on the durability of concrete. The durability of concrete poured on land is better than that poured in water. Different mineral admixtures have different effects on the durability of concrete: the frost resistance of the underwater non-dispersible concrete specimens with silica fume is the best; the impermeability and chloride ion permeability of the non-dispersible underwater concrete specimens with waterproofing agent are the best; and the alternation of wetting and drying has adverse effects on the durability indexes of the non-dispersible underwater concrete.

The durability of underwater non-dispersible concrete is tested and the results can be used for reference in engineering practice.

The purpose of this paper was to use visual and arc sensors to simultaneously obtain the underwater wet welding information, and a weld seam-forming model was made to predict the weld seam's geometric parameters. It is difficult to obtain a fine welding quality in underwater welding because of the intense disturbances of the water environment. To automatically control the welding quality, the weld seam-forming model should first be established. Thus, the foundation was laid for automatically controlling the underwater welding seam-forming quality.

Visual and arc sensors were used simultaneously to obtain the weld seam image, current and voltage information; then signal algorithms were used to process the information, and the back propagation (BP) neural network was used to model the process.

Experiment results showed that the BP neural network model could precisely predict the weld seam-forming parameters of underwater wet welding.

A weld seam-forming model of underwater wet welding process was made; this laid the foundation for establishing a controller for controlling the underwater wet welding process automatically.

This paper aims to present a mosaicking method for underwater robotic applications, whose result can be provided to other perceptual systems for scene understanding such as real-time object recognition.

This method is called robust and large-scale mosaicking (ROLAMOS) and presents an efficient frame-to-frame motion estimation with outlier removal and consistency checking that maps large visual areas in high resolution. The visual mosaic of the sea-floor is created on-the-fly by a robust registration procedure that composes monocular observations and manages the computational resources. Moreover, the registration process of ROLAMOS aligns the observation to the existing mosaic.

A comprehensive set of experiments compares the performance of ROLAMOS to other similar approaches, using both data sets (publicly available) and live data obtained by a ROV operating in real scenes. The results demonstrate that ROLAMOS is adequate for mapping of sea-floor scenarios as it provides accurate information from the seabed, which is of extreme importance for autonomous robots surveying the environment that does not rely on specialized computers.

The ROLAMOS is suitable for robotic applications that require an online, robust and effective technique to reconstruct the underwater environment from only visual information.

Underwater protection of new tonnage. John S. Craig & Co. Ltd. have for several years carried out an intensive research programme in order to formulate a satisfactory painting and protective system for the underwater bodies of new ship constructions. Tests resulted in the Clan Sutherland, built by Greenock Dockyard Co. Ltd. for the owners, Messrs. Cayzer, Irvine & Co. Ltd., being coated with the system which had been evolved, consisting of a chemical treatment by Foscote R.S. followed by two coats of Impervo metal primer.

The purpose of this study is to develop a new positioning method for remotely operated vehicle (ROV) in the nuclear power plant. The ROV of the nuclear power plant is developed to inspect the reactor cavity pools, the component pools and spent-fuel storage pools. To enhance the operational safety, the ability of localizing the ROV is indispensable.

Therefore, the positioning method is proposed based on the MEMS inertial measurement unit and mechanical scanning sonar in this paper. Firstly, the ROV model and on board sensors are introduced in detail. Then the sensor-based Kalman filter is deduced for attitude estimation. After that, the positioning method is proposed that divided into static positioning and dynamic positioning. The improved iterative closest point-Kalman filter is deduced to estimate the global position by the whole circle scanning sonar data in static, and the relative positioning method is proposed by the small scale scanning sonar data in dynamic.

The performance of the proposed method is verified by comparing with the visual positioning system. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is proved by the experiment in the reactor simulation pool of the Daya Bay Nuclear Power Plant.

The research content of this manuscript is aimed at the specific application needs of nuclear power plants and has high theoretical significance and application value.