Heavy construction equipment is routinely used on construction projects that entail earthmoving operations. Owning and operating these machines may comprise a significant portion of the project costs. An important element of the owning costs is the residual value. However, the nature of the residual value of construction equipment is largely unknown. Ongoing research at Virginia Tech examines t...

The cooperative housing sector is directed at low and medium income residents who cannot afford to buy their homes in the regular private market. Due to social housing legislation, it is possible to build cooperative housing below regular market costs and use tax benefits, therefore providing affordable dwellings to their owners. Traditional cooperative housing used to provide less comfort and ...

Concrete infrastructure systems require large capital investments and resource flows to construct and maintain. An integrated life cycle assessment and cost model was developed to evaluate infrastructure sustainability, and compare alternative materials and designs using environmental, economic and social indicators. The model is applied to two alternative concrete bridge deck designs: one a co...

Allocation of construction risks between clients and their contractors has a significant impact on the total construction costs. This paper presents a system dynamics (SD)-based approach for quantitative risk allocation. Using the proposed SD based approach, all the factors affecting the risk allocation process are modeled. The contractor’s defensive strategies against the one-sided risk alloca...

Original scientific paper In the construction industry, air conditioners (AC) are vital structural segments affecting human’s comfort and health directly. In this context selection process for the proper AC requires the usage of multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) methods due to conflicting criteria such as purchasing and maintenance costs, technical sufficiency, quality of service, performan...

In the early stages of a large-scale housing project, many interior design alternatives remain to be confirmed after a rough review of the costs. The project participants move on to the later stages of budgeting and construction without the exact information on the interior costs, and several occasions may arise when costs increase or time delays occur, driven by interior design specification c...

The goal of this work is to calculate the full costs of transportation for autos, trucks, and buses in the Twin Cities region for the years 1998 and 2020. Our midrange estimate is that the costs were $27 billion in 1998, and the costs will grow to $42 billion in 2020 ($9,000 and $11,200 in per capita terms, respectively). These estimates include monetary and nonmonetary costs to individuals, fi...

We study the effects of the recent economic crisis on firms׳ bidding behavior and markups in sealed bid auctions. Using data from Austrian construction procurements, we estimate bidders׳ construction costs within a private value auction model. We find that markups of all bids submitted decrease by 1.5 percentage points in the recent economic crisis, markups of winning bids decrease by 3.3 perce...