Researchers have proposed many industrial or national sustainability evaluation indicator systems during the past decade, although there has not yet been a project-level sustainability evaluation system for the evaluation and execution monitoring of the sustainability status for a construction project. Without such an evaluation system, it will be difficult for the planners to plan the sustainable project objectives, for the contractors to select the sustainable execution alternatives, and for the facility managers to operate sustainable constructed facilities. To meet the abovementioned requirements, this paper presents an effort conducted in Taiwan to propose a Construction Project Sustainability Assessing System (CPSAS) considering three pillars of sustainability: environmental, social, and economic, based on the theoretical backgrounds from the literature and former successful sustainable projects. The proposed CPSAS comprises four levels: Level 1, 3 main pillars; Level 2, 8 categories; Level 3, 19 sub-categories; and Level 4, 31 indicators. Different selections of indicators for application in different project phases are suggested according to the prioritization via questionnaire surveys. A procedure for sustainable project management with the proposed CPSAS is suggested to the project management team. Finally, three green building projects and two civil infrastructure construction projects of Taiwan were tested to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed CPSAS. It is concluded that the proposed CPSAS is useful for construction stakeholders to achieve sustainability more effectively during the execution of a construction project.

Statistics show that novice and experienced construction workers face different risks of construction accidents. However, there is very little work on this topic. This study conducted empirical experiments to quantifying the effectiveness of immersive virtual-reality-based safety training (IVST) across 6 worker specialties in terms of facing 17 hazardous scenarios at real construction sites. An immersive virtual reality–based safety training system (IVSTS) is proposed to measure the effectiveness of IVST programs with regard to six specialties in 2 controlled groups: (1) novice workers (40 college students), and (2) experienced workers (40 randomly selected construction practitioners). The study results indicate that the proposed IVSTS improved the safety performance index of all 80 participants by 14.12% in terms of correct selection of personal protection equipment, and by 28.95% in terms of hazardous scenario identification. The improvement of safety learning performance of the novice workers was better than that of the experienced workers, especially for hazardous scenario identification, with a 15.90% higher improvement index. The improvement suggestions for the existing IVST program were summarized according to the influence of the individual characteristics of the trainees on the learning effect between the novice and the experienced IVST programs.

In contrast to traditional price-dominated lowest bid (LB) procurements, best value (BV) procurements select contractors most advantageous to the clients, taking into consideration not only prices but also other factors. Decisions on whether LB or BV approach should be adopted are difficult ones. There is yet to be any objective model developed to back up such decisions. This paper proposes an index named price elasticity of performance (PEP) that may serve as a quantitative measure to reach an objective decision. The theoretical model construction of PEP is also described. Two measures in the individual and market levels of PEP are defined. A design/build construction project is selected as a working example to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed method. Potential applications and limitations of the proposed method are also addressed. It is concluded that the proposed PEP method has the potential to resolve the dilemma of pursuing efficiency and avoiding violation of regulations in traditional ...