Prefabrication is considered as a modern method of construction, transferring part of on-site work into factories and generating a new decoupling point in supply chain. Management of prefabricated component (PC) suppliers plays a key role in the performance of prefabricated construction project (PCP). Evaluating and improving supplier management maturity (SMM) become critical issues for large contractors. Previous research on PCP supply chain mainly focused on technology, process and performance aspects, while paying little attention to supplier relationship management. This study proposes an assessment criteria system of supplier management from five dimensions, including procurement process, operation efficiency, relationship coordination and strategy alignment and corporate social responsibility. A maturity grid with five levels is designed to present continuous improvement of supplier management. 34 large PCP construction firms listed in contractor directory were investigated in China through semi-structured interview and questionnaire survey. Independent two-samples t-test and one-way analysis of variance were adopted to explore SMM of different groups according to business scope, procurement method and construction experience. The results indicate that the overall maturity level of supplier management is relatively low, implying that supply activity cannot achieve inter-organization integration. Management on relationship coordination and strategy alignment lag behind procurement management and operation efficiency. Single business contractors have higher SMM than diversified ones. Contractors integrated in engineering, procurement and construction are superior to design-bid-build contractors in supplier management, especially in relationship coordination and strategic alignment. Construction experience is conductive to supplier operation efficiency. Noticeably, there are no statistically significant differences in the performance of corporate social responsibility among different groups. These results will contribute to developing a benchmark framework for contractors to evaluate SMM and achieve continuous improvements in PCP.

Case-based reasoning (CBR) has been extensively employed in various construction management areas, involving construction cost prediction, duration estimation, risk management, tendering, bidding and procurement. However, there has been a dearth of research integrating CBR with construction safety management for preventing safety accidents. This paper proposes a CBR model which focuses on case retrieval and reuse to provide safety solutions for new problems. It begins with the identification of case problem attribute and solution attribute, the state of hazard is used to describe the problem attribute based on principles of people’s unsafe behavior and objective’s unsafe state. Frame-based knowledge representation method is adopted to establish the case database from dimensions of slot, facet and facet’s value. Besides, cloud graph method is introduced to determine the attribute weight through analyzing the numerical characteristics of expectation value, entropy value and hyper entropy value. Next, thesaurus method is employed to calculate the similarity between cases including word level similarity and sentence level similarity. Principles and procedures have been provided on case revise and case retain. Finally, a real-world case is conducted to illustrate the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed model. Considering the high potential for pre-control and decision-making of construction safety accident, the proposed model is expected to contribute safety managers to take decisions on prevention measures more efficiently.

Prefabricated residential building (PRB), as a sustainable modern method of construction, has been vested with strong momentum in China, while the sustainable performance of PRB cannot be well realized. The sustainable performance of PRB contingent on supply chain parties sustainable practice, especially general constructor’s sustainable development capacity (SDC) of supply chain management. Previous research on sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) of PRB is scarce, so there is a gap to evaluate supply chain sustainability from the perspective of general contractor. Through literature reviews and expert interviews, a process-oriented and general contractor centralized indicator system of SDC in PRB was established based on the sustainable development theory, the method of fuzzy AHP, and TOPSIS were employed to determine the indicator weight and make a comprehensive assessment. Three PRB projects which applied EPC contract were selected as case studies, through questionnaire survey and semi-interview towards general constructor, the effectiveness of proposed assessment method was demonstrated. The research can provide a decision support tool for project manager to evaluate and continuously improve supply chain sustainable performance of PRB.

Industrialized construction as a new method can dramatically improve the quality of buildings and efficiency of construction. However, there are many barriers when we push to develop industrialized buildings. Fewer codes and standards that are available for modern methods of construction and absence of relevant quality assessment tools and accreditation, which are the main problems need to be solved. Analyzing the status of industrialized building system at home and abroad, this paper tries to build industrialized building standard system (IBSS) framework model that is based on the system analysis methodology and theory of standardization. Firstly, the standard system scope is cleared, which covers a whole life cycle of industrialized building from preliminary design to building dismantling and reuse. Then the objective of IBSS clarifies the object of standardization, providing a basis for the standard items generation. Meanwhile, through analyzing the difference and application of the topology structure of the standard system, a mixed standard system structure is built. It integrates the classification hierarchy structure, matrix structure, and sequence structure. Finally, each standard should find a unique position in the IBSS, so the attribution of standard items must be figure out and the six-dimension space of attribution of standard is born. The study will provide a framework and theoretical basis for further improvement of IBSS.