Construction Management, Economics & Integrated Delivery

Our research builds on the School’s flagship courses in construction project management, quantity surveying (construction economics), building surveying, real estate, planning and development. Our focus maps strongly onto the UK Government’s commitment to innovation and improvements in construction through improved business processes, innovation and management including the greater use of Building Information Modelling (BIM) for integrated delivery.

The Centre focuses on key research themes to address productivity and construction waste using knowledge, innovation and digital transformation to improve cost certainty and predictability of construction projects and to address leadership challenges and skills gap.

Our approach is to leverage knowledge from multi-disciplinary teams in the School of Built Environment and Architecture, other Research Centres, like-minded institutions and industry partners to support the UK Government’s Construction Strategy 2016-2020 and Construction 2025 delivered by the Construction Leadership Council.

Area of expertise

Our research focuses on three key areas:

Construction Management:

1. Mega construction projects, procurement, knowledge management and innovation, risk management;
2. Equality, gender, diversity, welfare and modern slavery;
3. Innovation in teaching, lifelong, blended and distance learning, apprenticeships and conversion courses;
4. Leadership, ethics and professionalism in the built environment

Economics:

1. Project financing models (e.g. public private partnerships (PPP), carbon finance to mitigate climate change;
2. Market structure, growth strategies (e.g. mergers and acquisition, joint ventures, internationalisation in the construction market)
3. Life cycle and carbon cost planning, waste management;
4. Real estate, international property investment, strategic asset management

Integrated Delivery:

1. Integrated models such as joint venture, public private partnerships;
2. Tools for integrated delivery (e.g. big data analytics for process improvement, Building information modelling (BIM) for collaborative work, the management and integration of data for the built environment).

Cross-cutting themes:

The Centre also addresses cross-cutting issues such as sustainability, disaster management, resilience and climate change working with other research centres.

Current projects

Harmonization of Construction Health and Safety Practices in the Southern African Development Community

The research is carried out in collaboration with University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa to address an urgent need to strengthen standards of construction health and safety practices in the Southern African Development Community (SADC). The research funded through Newton Advanced Fellowships focuses on developing a framework for improving health and safety practices to promote a non-hazardous work environment and to reduce the burden of occupational injuries and fatalities in SADC.

Social and Ecological Resilience to River Floods and Coastal Disasters

The focus of the work carried out in collaboration with the Regional University of Blumenau (Brazil) is to generate ideas and approaches for addressing social and ecological resilience to river floods and coastal disasters which will form the basis of future international research collaboration. The work is funded by the British Council Newton Fund and Foundation for Research Funding and Innovation of the State of Santa Catarina (FAPESC) involves organising international research based collaborative workshop for Early Career Researchers from UK and Brazil.

Machine-based Learning for Analysis of Construction Data

The work is part of a KTP funded project by RICS/BCIS led by Computer Science in the School of Engineering to guide the development of the knowledge base for cost analysis and forecasting the cost of future construction projects.

Development of M&E Costing and Life­cycle Analysis

This is a KTP funded project by RICS/BCIS exploring the development of M&E costing and life­cycle analysis in construction projects to address a major problem with skills shortages in M&E measurement and cost planning in industry which led to the outsourcing of such services to Asian countries. The work is aimed at increasing the accuracy, reliability and consistency in M&E cost planning through the development of web-based tool for life-cycle analysis to enable professionals to access accurate and reliable M&E data.

Key facilities

The research Centre has access to various state-of-the-art laboratory facilities in the School of Built Environment and Architecture:

• Rapid Prototyping Technology Lab
• Design and Soft Modelling Lab
• Digital Architecture Robotics Lab
• Virtual Engineering Suite
• Building Information Modelling Lab

Our Centre harnesses the research capability of staff (who include two Professors of international repute, three Associate Professors and several senior academics) in the School of Built Environment and Architecture, Division of Construction, Property and Surveying, one of the largest in the UK specialising in the built environment.

We have strong links with professional institutions such as the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS), Association of Project Managers (APM) and the Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB) through our accredited undergraduate and postgraduate programmes.

Our collaboration and partnerships are designed to build on the School’s flagship professionally accredited courses by connecting the agendas of today with the future challenges to address the needs of modern businesses and the employment market.

A key part of the strategy is external collaboration with professional institutions and industrial partners to tease out problems of the construction industry and to develop solutions through research and enterprise by strengthening the links with users of knowledge such as our industry partners and policy-makers to have real world impact.

CMEID partners

• The Joint Co-ordinators of CIB (International Council for Research and Innovation in Building and Construction) TG 95 on Professionalism and Ethics in Construction are Prof Charles Egbu and Prof George Ofori. The work of the task group is to foster stronger collaboration with academia and industry. The Centre is currently working with other partners:
• British University in Egypt (BUE) on a research on construction waste in Egypt which is the subject of an on-going PhD project.
• University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa to address an urgent need to strengthen standards of construction health and safety practices in developing nations.
• Regional University of Blumenau, Brazil to address challenges in developing social and ecological resilience to river floods and coastal disasters.

CMEID academic collaborators

• Elizabeth Whelan
• Nuha Eltinay
• Mehdi Shahparvari
• Itua Omokhomion
• Lucy Ogbenjuwa
• Upeksha Madanayake
• Ganiyu Sikiru
• Waheed Oseni
• Saam Kaviani
• Yumna Ahmedi
• Yamen Bakhaty
• Ahmed Daoud
• Adnan Ali

The Centre has been successful in securing funding for developing international research collaboration notably with the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa as part of Newton Advanced Fellowships and the Regional University of Blumenau in Brazil through the British Council Newton Fund.

Prof Charles Egbu has been appointed as Chair of ‘Building a safer future’ – Construction Industry Council (CIC) Competency Working Group 10 (Project Management) as part of the response to the Hackitt Review following the Grenfell fire and was a  Keynote Speaker at high level Infrastructural Development Conference for Africa in Dubai (23-28 August, 2018).

Key publications

• Kaluarachchi Nartallo, Y. (2018). Building Community Resilience in the Re-settlement of Displaced Communities. Procedia Engineering, 212 443-450. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.proeng.2018.01.057
• Fong, D., Naoum, S., and Egbu, C. (2018). Integrated Model for Stressors Stresses and Stress-Coping Behaviour of Construction Project Managers in the UK, International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, 11(3), 761-782. doi: https://doi.org/10.1108/IJMPB-07-2017-0071
• Phillips S & Forman T (2018) The Role of BIM in Retrofitting Works within the UK Social Housing Sector. Journal of Building Survey, Appraisal & Valuation 7(3) pp 1-17
• Hastie, J., Sutrisna, M., and Egbu, C. (2017). Modelling knowledge integration process in early contractor involvement procurement at tender stage – a Western Australian case study. Construction Innovation doi: https://doi.org/10.1108/CI-04-2016-0021
• Çıdık, M. S., Boyd, D., and Thurairajah, N. (2017) Ordering in disguise: digital integration in built- environment practices. Building Research and Information, 45(6), 665-680. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09613218.2017.1309767
• Kangwa, J., Kamau, J., Ahmed, A., Hirst, P., and Hyndman, F. (2017). Influence of Rice Husk Ash Density on the workability and strength of structural concrete. European Journal of Engineering Research and Science, 2(3), 36-43. doi: https://doi.org/10.24018/ejers.2017.2.3.292
• Opoku, A., and Egbu, C. (2017). Students' Perspective on the relevance of sustainability literacy in a postgraduate built environment programme. International Journal of Construction Education and Research doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/15578771.2017.1286417
• Çıdık, M.S., Boyd, D., and Thurairajah, N. (2017) Innovative capability of building information modelling in construction design. Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, 143(8), 04017047. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1061/(ASCE)CO.1943-7862.0001337
• Eccles, T (2017) ‘Corporate Real Estate Asset Management: Strategy and Implementation’, Routledge, 2017, 2nd edition (with Haynes and Nunnington). ISBN 978-1138915077.
• Akotia, J., Opoku, A., Egbu, C., and Fortune, C. (2016). Exploring the knowledge ‘base’ of practitioners in the delivery of sustainable regeneration projects. Construction Economics and Building, 16(2), 14-26. doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/AJCEB.v16i2.4892
• Robinson, H. and Udeaja C. (2015) Reusing Knowledge and Leveraging Technology to Reduce Design and Construction Costs, In Robinson, H, Symonds, B., Gilbertson, B and Ilozor, B (Eds.) Design Economics for the Built Environment: Sustainability in Project Evaluation, pp 229-237, Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118944790.ch16
• Amos, A and Robinson, H. (2015), Sustainable Design, Innovation and Competitiveness in Engineering Firms, In Robinson, H, Symonds, B., Gilbertson, B and Ilozor, B (Eds) Design Economics for the Built Environment: Sustainability in Project Evaluation, pp 333-356, Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118944790.ch24
• Gu, G., Michael, L. and Cheng, Y. (2015) Housing supply and its relationships with land supply. International Journal of Housing Markets and Analysis, Vol. 8. Issue 3.
• Kaluarachchi Nartallo, Y. (2015). Challenges to leaders in promoting the design of innovative and sustainable social housing.In A. Opoku, and V. Ahmed (Eds.), Leadership and sustainability in the Built Environment (109-122). Abingdon: Taylor and Francis Group.
• Bayati, A (2014) Geo Digital Documentation(GDD) for Arab and Islamic Heritage Preservation, International Journal of Geomatics and Geosciences, 2(2), 1-15. http://researchopen.lsbu.ac.uk/1735/