With the rapid development of urbanization in China, a vast number of subway projects are under construction and planned in many cities. However, the complexities of the environment in subway construction inherently bring about many uncertainties and risk factors. Understanding the inherent properties of the critical success factors (CSFs) will contribute significantly to the subway construction. From this perspective, this paper aims to identify the CSFs for safety management in subway construction. This study screened preliminary CSFs through a literature review and in-depth interviews with experts in China. Based on the data gathered and subsequently analyzed from the questionnaire surveys, a final total of 24 CSFs were identified. Then, interpretative structural modeling was employed to ascertain the interrelations among them. The result showed that the factors concerning the engineering survey and design not only occupy relatively higher scores in the questionnaire survey but also contribute significantly latent impacts on other factors. In addition, the creation of a reasonable schedule and the investment of the safety measures were also found to have a fundamental impact on the safety management of subway construction. This research guided the safety managers in determining the most important safety factors they must face and provided them valuable information that could promote safety performance and decrease the number of accidents over the course of subway construction.

The concept of sustainable development is gaining increasing popularity in construction industry. Previous studies have prioritized on the sustainable performance of construction projects from perspectives of economy and environment, social performance of construction projects has not drawn much attention. Social performance of construction projects refers to the extent which the projects meet the needs of current and future generations. Therefore, social performance of construction projects is critical for project success as well as social sustainability. However, a systematic framework for evaluating social performance of construction projects is absent. At the same time, existing methods are time-consuming and subject to certain degree of subjectivity. To overcome these limitations, the fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (FAHP) method is introduced in this paper to evaluate social performance of construction projects. A real-world hospital redevelopment project was employed as an empirical study to develop the systematic framework for social performance evaluation using FAHP method. By analyzing previous studies and the hospital redevelopment project, a systematic framework with 18 indicators of five dimensions (i.e., socio-economy development, socio-environment development, social flexibility, public service development, and environment and resource conservation) was developed. Social performance of two proposed schemes for hospital redevelopment project were evaluated using the FAHP approach. Results show Scheme 2 has a relative higher social performance sore than that of Scheme 1 and the hospital redevelopment project would improve socio-economy development, socio-environment development, social flexibility, and public service development, while it brings challenges to environment and resource conservation. More seriously, results indicate the hospital project may threaten healthcare and disease prevention of the local communities. Therefore, more measures should be taken to improve social performance of the hospital redevelopment project. The empirical study shows the proposed framework using FAHP method is viable for conducting social performance evaluation of construction projects, which could be helpful to improve social performance, reduce negative social impacts, and contribute to the social sustainability of construction projects.

Incorporating safety risk into the design process is one of the most effective design sciences to enhance the safety of metro station construction. In such a case, the concept of Design for Safety (DFS) has attracted much attention. However, most of the current research overlooks the risk-prediction process in the application of DFS. Therefore, this paper proposes a hybrid risk-prediction framework to enhance the effectiveness of DFS in practice. Firstly, 12 influencing factors related to the safety risk of metro construction are identified by adopting the literature review method and code of construction safety management analysis. Then, a structured interview is used to collect safety risk cases of metro construction projects. Next, a developed support vector machine (SVM) model based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) is presented to predict the safety risk in metro construction, in which the multi-class SVM prediction model with an improved binary tree is designed. The results show that the average accuracy of the test sets is 85.26%, and the PSO–SVM model has a high predictive accuracy for non-linear relationship and small samples. The results show that the average accuracy of the test sets is 85.26%, and the PSO–SVM model has a high predictive accuracy for non-linear relationship and small samples. Finally, the proposed framework is applied to a case study of metro station construction. The prediction results show the PSO–SVM model is applicable and reasonable for safety risk prediction. This research also identifies the most important influencing factors to reduce the safety risk of metro station construction, which provides a guideline for the safety risk prediction of metro construction for design process.

Although the acceleration of urbanization brings social and economic development, it also produces various problems. Accurate evaluation of sustainable urbanization performance can help local governments summarize experiences and solve problems. Sustainable urban development should focus not only on modern construction, but also on original natural ecosystems and traditional cultural protection. This paper develops a holistic framework based on an “origin” and “modernization” perspectives and uses the multilevel extension method and the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method for accurately evaluating sustainable urbanization performance. A case study of Chongqing City in China demonstrates the process of using the holistic framework and evaluation method. The empirical results from this study indicate that Chongqing has a medium level of sustainable urbanization. The city is considered as a medium level in “origin” performance and the “modernization” performance is good, while uncoordinated. The case study reveals that the proposed framework and the method are effective theoretical bases for policy-makers and practitioners to understand the performance of urban sustainability and for promoting urbanization toward better sustainability. Beyond the application case, the holistic framework and method can be applied to other cities.

Regional extreme rainfall events have occurred frequently in China, and subway tunnel construction faces possible threats under extreme weather conditions. Thus, in this study, we used the set pair analysis (SPA) approach to the construction safety evaluation of subway tunnels and developed a construction safety evaluation model under extreme rainfall circumstances. Firstly, based on careful consideration of the complex construction environment of subway tunnels under extreme rainfall weather conditions, a construction safety evaluation system of subway tunnels was developed considering four aspects: rainfall, hydrogeology, construction design, and management. Moreover, the weighting analysis of each index factor was carried out using the improved analytic hierarchy process (IAHP) method, the entropy weight method (EWM), and the linear weighting method. Secondly, considering the uncertainty of subway tunnels’ construction safety evaluation system and the fuzzy nature of evaluation-level classification, a construction safety evaluation system of subway tunnels based on the multivariate linkage number and set pair analysis theory was established. Finally, we applied the model to a subway tunnel construction case. The results show that the evaluation results are consistent with the actual engineering survey results, which verifies the practicality and effectiveness of the model in evaluating subway tunnel safety. We also determined the primary factors and risk development trends that affect the safety of subway tunnel construction under extreme rainfall weather conditions to guide the safety risk management of subway tunnel construction.