Highway construction projects are divided into new roadway construction and rehabilitation projects. In Korea total contract value of highway construction projects was over $2 Billion in 2011, which took over 24% of the total budget of the Korea Highway Corporation, and the volume is expected to be increase due to many rehabilitation projects for the existing roadways. Highway construction is known as a collection of linear and repetitive operations that are highly equipment intensive. Typically, construction equipment costs made up to 40% of the total construction costs on the highway construction projects. Therefore, construction cost and time for the highway construction projects are highly dependent upon the effective usage of construction equipment. In other words, the utilization of construction equipment has a great impact on the entire construction process and the optimal selection of the equipment becomes the key factor to the project success. However, most construction projects rely on experience or intuition without proper consideration or planning when it comes to select construction equipment. This research involves analyzing current equipment utilization to identify the major factors affecting equipment selection process for the asphalt pavement operation with the help of a computer simulation technique. The methodology developed can replace educated-guessing in the planning process for the equipment selection process.

As amount of information in construction industry is growing, the role of information system in project management is becoming increasingly important. With the emerging IT application to the advancing construction industry, construction project management system with advanced technology has been progressed vigorously to improve construction productivity and management efficiency. Recently, a web-based Project Management Information System (PMIS) is developed to support decision-making process by efficiently managing project related information generated from various discipline. Many firms are in the process of developing the PMIS system or already have been applied the system to various projects. However, PMIS is still in its early stage of development to be applied at industrial plant construction projects. With the complexity of the industrial plant projects, the industry practitioners need to be able to visualize the construction schedule information to manage the project efficiently. This study suggests methodologies for improving PMIS specialized for industrial plant piping construction projects to estimate the baseline schedule and performance measurement more accurately by developing a framework for the piping construction projects. By using this developed system, the researchers expect that piping construction projects will be more efficiently managed on a real-time basis through measuring progress of piping at each and every state of progress milestone and provide management with opportunities to forecast the level of efforts required to execute the remaining work scope in a timely manner.

This research involves developing a project management system for the piping construction projects. Piping construction as a part of mechanical package usually takes over 30% of total efforts for the industrial construction projects, thus is typically recognized as a critical work scope for the similar kinds of construction projects. Therefore, the piping construction under budget and within schedule is one of the crucial tasks for management, and it takes accurate prediction of performance throughout the project execution process. The researchers suggest an alternative model be utilized to accurately forecast piping work efforts required for the piping construction. The model developed incorporates difficulty factors to estimate the level of efforts more accurately and the validation of the model is in progress. The alternative method of forecast may improve the accuracy significantly.