As the world construction market becomes more globalized, an increasing number of construction companies, including both large companies (LCs) and small and medium-sized companies (SMCs), have extended their business to the global market. During this process, the number of collaborative ventures to mitigate the burden of entry risks has greatly increased. This study aims to investigate the formation of construction firms’ collaborative networks for performing international projects from both the LC and SMC network perspectives. To this end, 389 real cases of overseas projects executed by Korean firms over the last two decades that involved collaboration were analyzed using social network analysis (SNA) approach. The result showed that LCs and SMCs have different perspectives when pursuing collaborative ventures for overseas construction projects; LCs have a tendency to form large and dense networks, whereas SMCs prefer to maintain long-term and targeted relationships. Moreover, this study showed a series ...

Risk identification, assessment, and mitigation have been widely used for effective risk management in international construction projects. However, contractors sometimes cannot know what risk exists, and even when they identify the risk, they sometimes do not know the impact on project cost or how well it can be mitigated after award. Thus, this study analyzes 20,008 risk data points, which are composed of checked risk before bid, actual risk after award, and residual risk after mitigation, and shows that 15% of unidentified risks before a bid actually happen as risks after award, 33% of identified risks are underassessed, and 62% of actual risks are not mitigated after award. This study examines the influence of risk identification performance on assessment and mitigation performance and which risk management phase impacts cost performance more. This study also shows risk factors that are not well identified, assessed, and mitigated. These results help in managing practical risk control and identify which risk control should be studied further.

Few studies have verified the different causes of project delays between the owner and contractor perspectives. This article’s goal is to find what the causes of delay are and how to mitigate this delay depending on project performance. Thus, this study investigated 82 owner-side experts and 106 contractor-side experts in Tanzanian power construction projects. In successful projects (less than 10% time delay), the owners and contractors weighted similar causes such as vandalism and permits from authorities. They suggested similar mitigation strategies such as close project supervision, capacity building training, and proper logistics management. While in unsuccessful projects (more than 10% time delay), they exhibited many different responses. In particular, contractors weighted the causes incurred by changes in scope, owner’s poor supervision, delays in approval, failure in planning and designing risk more than contractors. Owners weighted the mitigation strategies such as top management support and timely procurement more than contractors. These findings will help project managers to understand owners’ and contactors’ different concerns and develop better solutions. This study mainly contributes to improving delay management in power construction projects in developing countries.

Given the global financial crisis and other plummeting market conditions in 2008, the international construction market moved from boom to recession. Although this recession is expected to be completed soon, many international contractors still have difficulty deciding on the strategies that are more effective during volatile market conditions. Korean contractors have already experienced one recession in recent times, instigated by the Asian financial crisis in 1997, and two boom economies before and after this recession. To investigate more effective strategies used in the overseas construction market, this study evaluates 31 Korean contractors’ international performance over the different periods (boom, recession, and reboom) and analyses the effects of diversification, localization, strategic alliance, resources cost allocation, and financial soundness by using 14 key variables. The results showed that regional diversification had a profound effect on overcoming the recessionary periods. Locali...

In the wake of increased globalization, more small and medium construction companies (SMCCs) are expanding into the global market. However, the international construction industry is different from the domestic with respect to resource, regulations, culture, entry strategies, and risk levels among other factors. This paper explores various ways and modes of internationalization for SMCCs under 13 key hypotheses that are relevant to the issues of internationalization from the perspective of SMCCs. To verify these hypotheses, this study used actual data from 560 cases of SMCCs’ overseas projects performed between 1990 and 2007. It was found that SMCCs’ entry scheme as prime contractors was more rewarding than in the case of subcontractors. Moreover, SMCCs are likely to evolve from subcontractors engaged with home-country contractors to subcontractors engaged with foreign contractors. Also, cultural distance is positively related to performance, but the effects of cultural properties are not as strong compar...

In complex construction projects, technical specifications have to be reviewed in a short period of time. Even experienced engineers find it difficult to review every detail of technical specifications. In addition, it is not easy to transfer experienced knowledge to junior engineers. With the technological innovation of large language models such as ChatGPT, a fine-tuned language model is proposed as an effective solution for the automatic review of technical specification documents. Against this backdrop, this study examines the in-house technical specification documents that are not publicly available. Then, two fine-tuned large language models, GPT-3 and LLaMA2, are trained to answer questions related to technical specification documents. The results show that the fine-tuned LLaMA2 model generally outperforms the fine-tuned GPT-3 model in terms of accuracy, reliability, and conciseness of responses. In particular, the fine-tuned LLaMA2 model suppressed hallucinogenic effects better than the fine-tuned GPT-3 model. Based on the results, this study discussed the applicability and limitations of a fine-tuned large language model for in-house knowledge management. The results of this study are expected to assist practitioners in developing a domain-specific knowledge management solution by fine-tuning an open-source large language model with private datasets.