As construction projects have significantly increased in size and become more complicated, the number of claims and dispute cases between participating parties during the construction work have been continuously increasing. To prevent such claims and disputes, the participants need to be assured of their contractual positions and rights based on contract facts. For this reason, the process of writing and reviewing the contracts for construction work is crucial. Most international construction projects require contract management teams to review all the possible risks in the contracts during the bidding periods. However, it is very difficult to review a vast number of contracts in a short period of time. Therefore, in this study, we proposed an automatic model of contract-risk extraction based on natural language processing (NLP) that can automatically detect the poisonous clauses of the contract in order to support contract management for construction companies (contractors). In validating the performance of the automatic model developed in this study, we found that the precision and recall were both 81.8% compared with manual review. This study is meaningful since a model has been developed that can carry out a preemptive contract-risk review.

Traditional construction planning, which depends on historical data and heuristic modification, prevents the integration of managerial details such as productivity dynamics. Specifically, the distance between planning and execution brings cost overruns and duration extensions. To minimize variations, this research presents a Building Information Modeling (BIM)-integrated simulation framework for predicting productivity dynamics at the construction planning phase. To develop this framework, we examined critical factors affecting productivity at the operational level, and then forecast the productivity dynamics. The resulting plan includes specific commands for retrieving the required information from BIM and executing operation simulations. It consists of the following steps: (1) preparing a BIM model to produce input data; (2) composing a construction simulation at the operational level; and (3) obtaining productivity dynamics from the BIM-integrated simulation. To validate our framework, we applied it to a structural steel model; this was due to the significance of steel erections. By integrating BIM with construction operation simulations, we were able to create reliable construction plans that adapted to project changes. Our results show that the developed framework facilitates the reliable prediction of productivity dynamics, and can contribute to improved schedule reliability, optimized resource allocation, cost savings associated with buffers, and reduced material waste.

The construction bidding process takes place in the early stages of a construction project. The bidding process involves many uncertainties since the construction risk factors are predicted and reflected in the bid price before construction commences. Therefore, bidders should thoroughly understand the uncertainty factors of the project before make bidding decisions. The uncertainty risk of construction projects is determined by the content that is contained in the bidding document. If the information provided in the bidding document is not accurate and is unclear, the uncertainty of the projects increases. Thus, this study is performed to predict risks in the bidding process of construction projects by analyzing the uncertainty of the bidding document and using it as factors to predict a project’s bidding risk. To achieve this, bidding risk prediction modeling was conducted using the pre-bid clarification information of each project. In addition, text mining on pre-bid RFI documents, which are in an unstructured text data format, was performed and the results of text mining were used as major influencing factors for the risk prediction models. As a result, the accuracy of the risk prediction model including text data was improved (72.92%) when compared to the prediction model using only numeric data (52.08%). The results of this study are expected to strengthen the possibility of further similar studies in the future since it enhances the predictive accuracy by incorporating the uncertainty of the bidding document, which is rarely considered in previous studies.

Many construction firms have promoted diversification as an important growth strategy. However, previous studies on diversification performance show conflicting results on the correlation between diversification and business performance. Although this is partly because of the different theoretical perspectives of researchers, it is mainly derived from the differences between the various industries and their market environments. Thus, this study considers the influencing factors, such as construction market environment, company size, and business segment, which affect the relationship between diversification and business performance to analyze the relationship between international business diversification and the business performance of international contractors. Based on the data released in the Engineering News Record and financial reports, varied statistical exploration including correlation and clustering analysis were performed to derive effective strategies grounded in the relationship between diversification level and business performance. According to the analysis results, the international business diversification levels showed a clear positive correlation with sales revenue, whereas business diversification, profit margin, and current ratio did not show a strong correlation; rather, a higher level of diversification tended to weaken the profit margin and current ratio. From the result showing the correlation between diversification and business performance derived from the clustering analysis, it was found that although diversification is essential to facilitate growth in the size of the company, it can reduce the profitability and stability of a diversified company. Ultimately, this study will provide appropriate and effective business strategy guidelines for international contractors endeavoring to expand their international markets.

Construction disputes are one of the main challenges to successful construction projects. Most construction parties experience claims—and even worse, disputes—which are costly and time-consuming to resolve. Lessons learned from past failure cases can help reduce potential future risk factors that likely lead to disputes. In particular, case law, which has been accumulated from the past, is valuable information, providing useful insights to prepare for future disputes. However, few efforts have been made to discover legal knowledge using a large scale of case laws in the construction field. The aim of this paper is to enhance understanding of the multifaceted legal issues surrounding construction adjudication using large amounts of accumulated construction legal cases. This goal is achieved by exploring dispute-related contract terms and conditions that affect judicial decisions based on their verdicts. This study builds on text mining methods to examine what type of contract conditions are frequently referenced in the final decision of each dispute. Various text mining techniques are leveraged for knowledge discovery (i.e., analyzing frequent terms, discovering pairwise correlations, and identifying potential topics) in text-heavy data. The findings show that (1) similar patterns of disputes have occurred repeatedly in construction-related legal cases and (2) the discovered dispute topics indicate that mutually agreed upon contract terms and conditions are import in dispute resolution.