Towards contracting strategy usage for rework in construction projects: a comprehensive review

Abstract

Rework has been the core of attention for several years in the industry and academia as it affects the performance of projects. However, the trend of rework academic papers indicates an increasing rate in recent years; the overall research lacks a comprehensive review of the implemented theories and proposed models to explore further directions for rework management. Thus, to achieve a better understanding of rework it is necessary to perform an extensive review. This research aims to explore various insights from rework-related articles, discuss major research areas, and identify gaps for future studies looking closely at construction contracts. The selected articles are from three databases: "Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar". The findings are categorized into six study areas: sources of rework, models and solutions, management and strategies, theories and techniques, rework impacts, and factors affecting rework. The analysis of the employed techniques across these topics showed that System Dynamic Modelling, Action Research, Analytic Hierarchy Process, and Regression have been used more frequently than other methods. The comprehensive review also shed light on the new ways of thinking, analyzing, and controlling the impacts of the rework. This paper proposes the assessment of rework causes in the conditions of contract which provides opportunities for improvement of the construction contracts.

Rework causes classification model with liable parties of the contract in construction projects

“…The investigation into the sources of rework has taken more attention than the other study area of rework such as rework impacts, proposed strategies, implemented theories, reduction models and other solutions (Asadi et al, 2021b). Identifying the root causes of rework has always been an essential part of research around rework as it is the first step towards rework management either through reduction or prevention (Hwang et al, 2009;Ye et al, 2015;Ndwandwa et al, 2017).…”

“…The variety of uses of different classification methods is presented in Table 1. The lack of systematic literature review on rework causes will require further investigation to unify all identified causes in a model that refers to the contract parties under various project stages (Ye et al, 2015;Asadi et al, 2021b). As such, a classification model is needed to be designed and proposed to address rework causes under the contract party's liability.…”

State of Science: Why Does Rework Occur in Construction? What Are Its Consequences? And What Can be Done to Mitigate Its Occurrence?

“…The need to perform rework is a pervasive problem in construction [6]. Accordingly, an extensive body of work has been undertaken to determine the costs and causes of rework and to propose strategies to prevent its occurrence [11][12][13][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24]. Such studies have focused on determining proximal (i.e., singular) rework causes, using prefixes such as 'poor,' 'lack of,' 'inappropriate,' and 'inadequate,' and thus have neglected the interdependency of events leading to its occurrence.…”

“…In addition, some studies have focused on identifying single (or a few) root causes [10][11][12][13][14][15][16]18,19,[22][23][24]26]. This approach promotes a reductionist view of causation, which we consider to be flawed, as multiple interacting contributions are often at play [25].…”

“…Consequently, this view has hindered scholars' ability to understand the context and conditions that lead to the manifestation of rework and their means to reduce its incidence in construction [27][28][29][30]. That is, the 'reductionist' perspective, which has traditionally been adopted to determine rework causation, relies on the use of 'one-size-fits-all' prevention strategies [15,17,20,21,23,24]. However, various error types evoke different responses, suggesting that strategies to address rework need to be tailor-made to the context in which they occur [6,7,[27][28][29].…”