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Proper layout and positioning of building components is essential for an accurate and productive construction process. Knowing the specific location and position where a building component belongs in real-time (instantaneous), would enhance the crafts person's performance significantly (Beliveau, 1992a). The Real-time Position Measurement (RtPM) system was developed to increase productivity and accuracy in the construction industry by providing the crafts person real-time position and measurement information of specific building locations or components. This measurement information is relayed to the crafts person through the human interface, which consists of graphical navigational maps and alphanumeric displays. Two experiments were conducted. Experiment A tested the graphical computer interfaces and Experiment B compared the graphical interfaces versus an alphanumeric interface. Both experiments simulated building component positioning tasks. Subjects acted as construction workers whose jobs were to accurately place simulated building components on specified target locations utilizing the RtPM system. Participants used the RtPM's navigational maps, displays and/or coordinate system to place several anchor bolts onto specific locations on the concrete piers. The experiments provided data on the speed and accuracy of positioning tasks while the subject was using the RtPM system. The data consisted of the time required to accomplish each building component positioning task and the accuracy of the subject's placement of the receiver pole on the target point. The results of Experiment A indicate that a heading-up map is better for navigational tasks using the RtPM system than that of a vector-up map. The treatment conditions which incorporated a heading-up map gave lower navigational times than those using a vector-up map. Subjects were also accurate across all treatment conditions in Experiment A. The results of Experiment A suggest that participants interpreted the navigational information across all conditions in the same manner thus achieving similar accuracies. The results of Experiment B indicate that the graphical interface provides good directional information and a high degree of accuracy when subjects perform positioning tasks using the RtPM system. The alphanumeric format, while providing a high degree of accuracy, did not provide a fast and effective way of navigation using the RtPM system. Graphical displays should be incorporated into the new software design for the RtPM system. These navigational experiments should provide a means for designing future RtPM surveying system software for the human user. Humans are critical components in most systems and are often neglected during the design process. The results from this research could significantly enhance the effectiveness by which humans interact with the RtPM system. / Master of Science

The construction industry leads the private sector with the most fatalities of any industry in the United States. With an expected growth of the industry in the next century, safe work environments are imperative. They will impact the bottom line of the industry through the reduction of fatal and non-fatal injuries. Although the causes of injuries and illnesses in construction have long been tracked, reported and researched, the industry continues to lead in occupational related fatal and non-fatal injuries. It is critical to understand if a tradeoff exists between safety and productivity to avoid shortcut behaviors in the field. This is specifically important due to the number of contractors, subcontractors and laborers that participate in the different projects. The overall objective of this research was to increase the understanding of the relationship between perceived and observed safety and productivity and to understand the variability in perception and behavior between crews working for the same general contractor in the homebuilding construction industry. For this research, questionnaires and behavioral observations were employed. The results demonstrated a significant moderate positive relationship between safety climate and perceived risk behavior at the crew level. A model was developed that suggests that safety climate and work ownership are predictors of perceived risk behaviors. This relationship is important to understand since employee attitudes, safety commitment and organizational factors may affect acceptability of safety processes and procedures. The differences among construction crews were evaluated at two levels, individual crews and critical path groups. All tests were significant for differences among crews. To further understand these differences, crews were grouped in accordance with the critical path of a homebuilding schedule. A significant difference existed for risk behavior, productivity loss and work ownership. Behavioral observations were used to evaluate crew performance. Top contributing behaviors of productivity, safety and waste were identified. The top behaviors provide improvement areas for productivity, safety and waste. Overall, learning from this research provided insight into the relationships between safety climate, risk behavior, productivity and work ownership. Understanding this relationship can contribute to the design of safety interventions, and consequently, the reduction of injuries and fatalities. / Ph. D.

Construction productivity improvement is a key concern for construction companies and the industry. Productivity in construction is a complex issue because: (1) it is influenced by multiple factors interactively; and (2) it is measured in different forms and at different levels of detail for different purposes. This objective of this research is to develop an internal Benchmarking and Metrics (BM&M) model for industrial construction enterprises to help them understand and implement mechanisms for continuously improving construction productivity. Processes are developed in the model for: 1. Measuring and reporting craft labour productivity performance in a consistent form for the purposes of internal benchmarking and comparison with a selected third-party benchmark, 2. Examining productivity influencing factors in two categories with respect to construction environment factors and construction practices implementation, 3. Establishing a productivity performance evaluation model to understand the mechanisms by which the environment factors and construction practices impact construction productivity, and 4. Conducting strategic gaps analysis of construction practices implementation within a company aimed at achieving “best in class” and continuous improvement. System functions in the model are validated through functional demonstration by applying statistical analysis on data collected by the designed benchmarking process and metrics from an industrial construction company. It is concluded that the model developed can be effectively used to understand the impact of practices implementation levels on construction productivity.

abstract: The construction industry faces important performance problems such as low productivity, poor quality of work, and work-related accidents and injuries. Creating a high reliability work system that is simultaneously highly productive and exceptionally safe has become a challenge for construction practitioners and scholars. The main goal of this dissertation was to create an understanding of high reliability construction work systems based on lessons from the production practices of high performance work crews. High performance work crews are defined as the work crews that constantly reach and maintain a high level of productivity and exceptional safety record while delivering high quality of work. This study was conceptualized on findings from High Reliability Organizations and with a primary focus on lean construction, human factors, safety, and error management. Toward the research objective, this dissertation answered two major questions. First, it explored the task factors and project attributes that shape and increase workers' task demands and consequently affect workers' safety, production, and quality performance. Second, it explored and investigated the production practices of construction field supervisors (foremen) to understand how successful supervisors regulate task and project demands to create a highly reliable work process. Employing case study methodology, this study explored and analyzed the work practices of six work crews and crew supervisors in different trades including concrete, masonry, and hot asphalt roofing construction. The case studies included one exceptional and one average performing crew from each trade. Four major factors were considered in the selection of exceptional crew supervisors: (1) safety performance, (2) production performance, (3) quality performance, and (4) the level of project difficulty they supervised. The data collection was carried out in three phases including: (1) interview with field supervisors to understand their production practices, (2) survey and interview with workers to understand their perception and to identify the major sources of task demands, and (3) several close field observations. Each trade's specific findings including task demands, project attributes, and production practices used by crew supervisors are presented in a separate chapter. At the end the production practices that converged to create high reliability work systems are summarized and presented in nine major categories. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Construction 2012

The purpose of this master's thesis is to define the productivity of the caused-motion construction and describe what syntactic and semantic constraints limit it. While some consideration is given to the possibilities of using the construction's arguments, the principal focus is on the study of the main verbs that occur in the construction. The verbs can come from a variety of different semantic classes because of the construction's polysemous character and the coercion process, which allows constructions to change verbs' meaning and valency structure. The major constraints on the productivity of constructions that were discussed in Goldberg (1995), Suttle & Goldberg (2011) and Robenalt & Goldberg (2015) are the semantic coherence principle, the correspondence principle, similarity to attested verb classes, coverage, statistical pre-emption and conservatism via entrenchment. These, together with the semantic constraints imposed by the caused-motion construction's meaning, were the expected restrictions on the productive use of verbs in the construction. The analysed examples of the caused-motion construction come from the Spoken BNC2014 (Love et al., 2017) which can be considered representative of present-day spoken British English. The construction and corpus token frequencies of the main verbs...