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Even though advanced heuristic and metaheuristic models have been developed for minimizing financing cost by using total float to adjust the start times of activities, these models overlook the fact that the attempt to minimize financing cost may result in more than one work schedule with minimum financing cost. It is therefore not surprising that no research has been conducted to select the best financing schedule out of the multiple optimal work schedules. It is well known that total float must be used sparingly to avoid the creation of too many critical and near-critical activities that may cause delays in the project duration. Indeed, the loss of schedule flexibility caused by the use of total float comes at a cost. It is argued in this paper that the cost of float consumption should be a vital part of models designed to minimize financing cost. The research presented in this paper attempts to fill this gap. A model is proposed in this study that not only minimizes financing cost but also demonstrates the negative impact of not considering the cost of float consumption in reaching the optimal solution, an area of research that is mostly overlooked in the finance-based scheduling literature. This research contributes to the body of knowledge by demonstrating that there may be more than one work schedule with minimum financing cost, and that the cost of float consumption must be considered to find the most optimal solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Awarding a contract to a bidder who has unbalanced the bid may cost more money to the owner. An owner who determines that a bid has been unbalanced has the legal right to reject the bid. Although several models have been developed to detect unbalanced bids, some researchers still assert that the number of cases in which owners mistakenly identify balanced bids as unbalanced is too great to ignore. One of the reasons of this failure is the use of an inappropriate benchmark against which the offered unit prices are compared. In this paper it is argued that the use of the geometric mean of the unit prices provided by the bidders as a benchmark helps to obtain robust solutions and an advanced decision-making model is proposed in which the Information Entropy and VIKOR methods are used to detect unbalanced bids. The results obtained from an example project drawn from the literature demonstrate how owners may be misled if they use an inappropriate benchmark in detecting unbalanced bids. This study contributes to the body of knowledge by highlighting the negative impacts of using flawed benchmarks in this process, an area of research that is mostly ignored in the unbalanced bidding literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivation is one of the key factors that stimulate individuals to improve their productivity. Therefore, motivation of construction workers has been debated with considerable interest by participants in the construction industry. However, motivating only construction workers, but ignoring the motivation of construction professionals, viz., architects and civil engineers, may not be enough to successfully complete a construction project. Although motivation of construction professionals may also enhance the performance of a construction project, this topic is mostly ignored in the motivation literature. This study attempts to fill this gap by (1) identifying the motivators that are of importance to architects and civil engineers and (2) exploring the statistical difference between architects’ and civil engineers’ motivators. For this purpose, a questionnaire survey was administered to Turkish architects and civil engineers to collect data on their perceptions of the importance of different motivators. The case of Turkey is investigated because several of the larger Turkish contractors undertake construction projects outside their home country. Statistical analysis was performed on the collected data to verify whether there are statistically significant differences in the perception of some motivators by architects and civil engineers. The study demonstrates the existence of a statistically significant difference between architects’ and civil engineers’ motivators. Identifying the architects’ and civil engineers’ motivators may help construction companies in motivating their architects and civil engineers more effectively, thus developing a quality workforce.

Unbalanced bidding, also known as skewed bidding, is the process of increasing and/or decreasing the prices of various bid items without altering the total offered bid price. Bids can be unbalanced either mathematically (front-end loading) or materially (quantity error exploitation). Owners should be very careful when evaluating the tenders as awarding a contract to an unbalanced bid may result in severe cost overruns because the prices of those items do not reflect their true costs and markup allocations. Unbalanced bidding is still a contentious issue in the construction industry. While some researchers consider it as a legal bidding strategy in such a fierce competitive business environment, others view it as an unethical practice and claim that unbalanced bids should be disqualified. Studies regarding unbalanced bidding can be categorized into two groups: (1) the ones focusing on detecting or preventing this practice to help owners; and 2) the ones focusing on optimizing unbalanced bidding to help contractors. This study aims to develop a model, which consists of eight grading systems, to assist owners in detecting materially unbalanced bids. The proposed model is the improved version of the previous model, which was composed of five grading systems. In order to demonstrate how this grading-based model can be used by owners, an illustrative example is presented. It was found that owners can easily and successfully detect unbalanced bids via the proposed model.