Flexible pavements and climate are interactive. Pavements are climate sensitive infrastructure, where climate can impact their deterioration rate, subsequent maintenance, and life-cycle costs. Meanwhile, climate mitigation measures are urgently needed to reduce the environmental impacts of pavements and related transportation on the macroclimate and microclimate. Current pavement design and life cycle management practices may need to be modified to adapt to changing climates and to reduce environmental impacts. This paper reports an extensive literature search on qualitative and quantitative pavement research related to climate change in recent years. The topics cover climate stressors, sensitivity of pavement performance to climatic factors, impacts of climate change on pavement systems, and, most importantly, discussions of climate change adaptation, mitigation, and their interactions. This paper is useful for those who aim to understand or research the climate resilience of flexible pavements.
Organizational success heavily relies on the competitiveness of products and services under rapidly changing market conditions. This enterprise competitiveness becomes more critical for project-based enterprises as modernization of the Chinese construction industry creates greater challenges and uncertainty in construction operations, which determines the sustainable advantages of enterprises to a certain degree. Traditional wisdom focuses on cost efficiency, asset differentiation, and service performance to gain competitive advantages. This paper explores the influence of organizational flexibility and organizational innovation on enterprise competitiveness for Chinese construction organizations. A designed structured questionnaire was developed and conducted targeting the project-based enterprises in China’s construction industry and is accompanied by a structural equation modeling analysis. Results indicate a positive impact of organizational flexibility on enterprise competitiveness along with a mediation role of organizational innovation. The study concludes that new organizational strategies are required for Chinese project-based enterprises to maintain enterprise competitiveness in order to realize the sustainable development of enterprises.
China’s construction industry developed rapidly and safety production has become a vital issue. Improving the safety behavior of construction workers is an important measure to effectively decrease construction safety accidents. At present, a New Generation of Construction Workers (NGCWs) born after 1980 has gradually become the main force of construction companies in China and the special group characteristics coming from the intergenerational difference may make them behave differently in safety-related activities, therefore, it is very important to study how to promote their safety behavior. This paper aimed to explore the influencing mechanism of job satisfaction on the safety behavior of NGCWs and examine the mediating role of safety knowledge sharing and work engagement. Confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling analysis were applied to test the theoretical model. Empirical research results indicated that job satisfaction can effectively promote safety behavior through safety knowledge sharing and work engagement. Safety knowledge sharing plays a complete mediating role between job satisfaction and safety compliance behavior, as well as between job satisfaction and safety participation behavior. Moreover, work engagement plays a complete mediating role between job satisfaction and safety participation behavior, which can provide valuable management references for China’s construction companies to strengthen their safety behavior.
Reclaimed asphalt pavement (RAP) has received wide application in asphalt pavement construction and maintenance and it has shown cost-effectiveness over virgin hot mix asphalt (HMA). HMA with a high content of reclaimed asphalt (RA) (e.g., 40%) is sometimes used in practice, however, it may have significant adverse effects on the life cycle performance and related costs. In particular, challenges may arise as the life cycle performance of RAP is also affected by local climatic conditions. Thus, it is important to investigate whether it is still economic to use RAP under future local climate, with consideration of life cycle performance. A case study was conducted for various road structures on Interstate 95 (I-95) in New Hampshire (NH), USA for the investigation. The case study utilized dynamic modulus testing results for local virgin HMA and HMA with 40% RA (as major material alternatives) to predict life cycle performance of the selected pavement structures, considering downscaled future climates. Then, a life cycle cost analysis (LCCA) was considered to estimate and compare the life cycle cash flow of the investigated road structures. Responsive maintenance (overlay) and effectiveness were also considered in this study. It was found that using 40% RA in HMA can reduce agency costs by up to approximately 18% under the 2020–2040 predicted climate and NH should consider this practice under predicted future climate to reduce agency costs.
1 May 2021 in Journal of Management in Engineering
The rapid construction of emergency hospitals in areas with a severe COVID-19 outbreak was one of the effective ways to contain and fight the pandemic. However, such rapid construction megaprojects need more than a formal management system to drive the organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) of participants in order to compensate for the lack of formal rules and regulations. Two emergency hospitals especially built for COVID-19 are taken as case studies in this paper to establish a mechanism model and examine the impact of the perceived strength of the COVID-19 event on the emergency megaproject citizenship behavior (EMCB) based on affective events theory (AET). Data from 340 project participants in the two hospitals were collected and tested using structural equation modeling. The results demonstrate that first, the positive affect induced by the COVID-19 event is the direct antecedent that promotes EMCB. Participants’ cognition of event criticality and event novelty was seen to have a positive driving effect on the positive affect. However, their cognition of event urgency and event disruption only triggers negative affect. Second, the positive affect induced by the COVID-19 event was seen to have a strong positive and direct promoting effect on the six dimensions of EMCB. Contrary to expectations, the negative affect induced by the COVID-19 event does not significantly influence the six dimensions of EMCB. This study provides empirical suggestions for project managers on how to motivate EMCB through public emergency management to help achieve project objectives.