Construction Management Research Seminar held at XJTLU

December 31, 2019

On Nov. 25th, a construction management research seminar was successfully held in the Department of Civil Engineering, at XJTLU. The seminar lasted for one day, where Dr. Fangyu Guo chaired the morning session and Dr. Cheng Zhang chaired the afternoon session.

Professor Charles Jahren (pictured below) was the main speaker of the morning session. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Construction. He is the W.A. Klinger Teaching Professor and Morrill Professor at Iowa State University. He is the Professor-in-Charge of Construction Engineering Program and Associate Chair of Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering. He is also the current chair of editorial board and former editor-in-chief of one of the leading journals in construction management field – Journal of Construction Engineering and Management.

The main topic of Prof. Jahren’s morning speech was on Civil Integrated Management (CIM). “A civil integrated management (CIM) system for transportation agencies comprises a common data pool that is accessible by all authorized stakeholders providing information to facilitate decision making for all phases of projects and programs including planning, design, construction, operation, and asset management as well as a return to the planning phase when the facilities reach the end of their lives.” This is how Prof. Jahren described CIM.

“U.S. transportation agencies are incrementally approaching the development of CIM systems by identifying subsystems that can serve as the initial platform and expanding from those subsystems with the assistance of peer agencies that have better developed complementary subsystems. Some of these subsystems can include 3D engineered models, geographic information systems, and electronic document management systems. Some examples technologies that benefit by having access to the data pool are LiDAR, Intelligent compaction, and automatic machine guidance.”

Prof. Jahren discussed effective approaches and challenges for implementation, provided illustrative case studies, and made recommendations for how stakeholders and researchers can prepare themselves for participating in the CIM implementation.

In addition to the CIM topic, there was also a discussion session on publishing archival journal articles. Prof. Jahren introduced the typical process of reviewing articles submitted to a journal and addressed the importance of selecting an appropriate journal for submission. He also described the major considerations of the editorial board and reviewers (e.g. rigorous of the research methods, research contents and results, and significance and contributions of the study, etc.) and discussed how to properly respond to reviewers’ comments.

In the afternoon session of the seminar, three guest speakers provided inspiring speech on their research studies, including Professor Charles Jahren, Dr. Yingyan Jin from Tongji University, and Dr. Shang Zhang from Suzhou University of Science and Technology.

Prof. Jahren has research experiences of maintaining rural roads since 1995. He introduced the common factors that cause cracks on the concrete road and described different treatments that have been investigated by their research team over the years (e.g. cold-in-place recycling asphalt, full depth reclamation, seal coats, etc.).

Dr. Yingyan Jin (pictured below), assistant professor in the Department of Construction Management and Real Estate at Tongji University, introduced a data driven approach for decision making on optimizing construction design in real time. According to Dr. Jin, “the impact of the construction of underground structures on surrounding infrastructure raises concerns since movements caused by deep excavations might damage adjacent buildings. Unfortunately, the prediction of geotechnical behavior is difficult due to uncertainties and lack of information of on the underground environment. Under these circumstances, the observational method has been used to avoid such redundancy by modifying the design based on the knowledge gathered during construction.”

Dr. Shang Zhang (pictured below), an associate professor and head of department of construction management at Suzhou University and Technology and Science, gave a speech entitled as “Construction industry and construction management education in China”. He discussed the development trend of Chinese construction industry in terms of output value, types of projects, and procurement methods. Also, he talked about the history and status quo of construction management education.

Written by Dr. Fangyu Guo; Edited by Dr. Konstantinos Papadikis
Photos taken by Tianqi Liu

December 31, 2019