No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

Workforce planning in the construction industry too often ignores the symbiotic relationship between employee and employer objectives by overly concentrating on corporate objectives such as maximizing productivity at the expense of construction workers' career development needs. Overall, the consequence of this approach is sub-optimal performance. To address this problem, this paper presents an innovative multi-objective model which enables managers to optimize the relationship between these interdependent corporate priorities. The proposed model is implemented and solved using a mixed-integer nonlinear programming on a case study involving the allocation of tasks to employees with different skill levels in a multidisciplinary engineering consulting company. While having a small loss of productivity, the results show a significant improvement in the career development of workers compared to conventional productivity-oriented workforce planning models, with on average 8.6% improvement in employees' closeness to their ideal skill set. Furthermore, the model produced Pareto optimal points and a Pareto curve which enabled client/model users to select optimum job allocation based on their preferences. This research represents a paradigm shift towards a new class of socially responsible workforce planning models in which the objectives of both employees and employers are optimized.

Within the highly waste-generative context of Australia, waste from demolition of office fit-out significantly contributes to unsustainable landfilling. The extant literature is, however, slim on scrutiny of the situation. Therefore, this study aims to uncover office fit-out demolition processes and product features that drive high ratio of landfilling fit-out elements. The research used ten case projects and fourteen interviews to document visible and latent parameters of office fit-out waste. Waste-stream mapping and decision-tree techniques, in conjunction with basic descriptive statistics, were used to model and visualize the extent and drivers of unsustainable fit-out demolition. Further, an exemplar product features analysis was conducted to validate the identified drivers. The findings show that 78% of fit-out waste from the studied cases is landfilled. This high rate is attributed to both latent and visible factors. The main latent factor is high lease price of premium or high-quality offices which favours expeditious demolition with low consideration for reuse and recycling. Key technically visible barriers are volumetric furniture, heterogeneous fit-out assemblies, and insufficient critical mass. To move away from landfilling, production of office fit-out should be transformed for sustainable material adequacy, product re-configurability and de-constructability, and easy handling in the use phase.