Fast-track construction projects have become more popular in recent years in response to growing industry demand. By allowing downstream construction activities to start with incomplete information from upstream design activities, fast-tracking (through overlapping) allows for shorter project duration at the expense of potential rework. This leaves practitioners with the challenge of determining the optimal fast-tracking strategy to meet project schedule requirements while avoiding excessive amounts of rework. This paper presents an optimization-based model that serves as a decision support tool in scheduling fast-track construction activities. The model takes into consideration information exchange between upstream and downstream activities and uses the concepts of sensitivity and evolution to maximize the net benefits of fast-tracking. The model is illustrated on an ongoing construction project, which was analysed under various overlapping scenarios. The results indicate substantial time savings depending on the speed of evolution and sensitivity. The project schedule can be shortened by up to 50 days without causing excessive amounts of rework.

Fast-track construction projects have become more popular in recent years in response to growing industry demand. By allowing a downstream activity to start with incomplete information from upstream activities, fast-tracking allows for shortening the project duration at the expense of an increased likelihood of rework. This leaves practitioners with the challenge of determining the optimal fast-tracking strategy, which meets project schedule requirements and does not cause excessive amounts of rework. This paper presents an optimization based model that serves as a decision support tool in scheduling fast-track construction projects. The model takes into consideration information exchange between upstream and downstream activities. The objective function of the model is to maximize the net benefits from fast-tracking. Rework time and cost are deduced from the literature on rework in construction projects. The model is illustrated on a small scale case study, which was analyzed under various scenarios. The paper concludes with a discussion of the applicability of the model on complex construction projects.

Politicization of ethnic identities is a major impediment to moderation in deeply divided societies. Two schools of thought dominate the literature on democracy in those types of societies, consociationalism and centripetalism. Consociationlaists support the philosophy of inclusion, power-sharing and mutual vetoes whereas, Centripetalists, promote the engineering of political institutions that encourage moderation through vote-pooling. Consequently, institutional engineering, more specifically electoral engineering is as a key tool to manage cleavages. This thesis aligns itself with centripetalism and evaluates Lebanon’s electoral law passed in 2017 against centripetalist core concepts, both in theory and using empirical case studies from the results of Lebanon’s 2018 elections. Theoretical evaluation of Lebanon’s electoral law showed that district formation, seats allocation and single preferential voting largely contradicts centripetalists concepts of bargaining, vote-pooling and moderate political discourses. Also, empirical results in Lebanon’s 2018 parliamentary elections showed that cross-confessional and cross sectarian votes of minority groups are very high in districts with established majorities and vice versa. However, these votes are found to be very minimal in districts where sectarian groups have an equal number of voters and parliamentary seats. Empirical results showed that the electoral law in Lebanon will encourage, with a high likelihood, the Lebanese voter to cast a sectarian vote in districts where sectarian groups have approximately equal number of voters and. The thesis concludes that should political moderation be promoted in Lebanon; proportional representation is be rectified by redefining district formation and seats allocation. Also, single preferential vote should be substituted by multiple preferential voting with ranking system.