Nation & internation practices in decision support tools in road asset management

This document provides a review of international and national practices in investment decision support tools in road asset management. Efforts were concentrated on identifying analytic frameworks, evaluation methodologies and criteria adopted by current tools. Emphasis was also given to how current approaches support Triple Bottom Line decision-making. Benefit Cost Analysis and Multiple Criteria Analysis are principle methodologies in supporting decision-making in Road Asset Management. The complexity of the applications shows significant differences in international practices. There is continuing discussion amongst practitioners and researchers regarding to which one is more appropriate in supporting decision-making. It is suggested that the two approaches should be regarded as complementary instead of competitive means. Multiple Criteria Analysis may be particularly helpful in early stages of project development, say strategic planning. Benefit Cost Analysis is used most widely for project prioritisation and selecting the final project from amongst a set of alternatives. Benefit Cost Analysis approach is useful tool for investment decision-making from an economic perspective. An extension of the approach, which includes social and environmental externalities, is currently used in supporting Triple Bottom Line decision-making in the road sector. However, efforts should be given to several issues in the applications. First of all, there is a need to reach a degree of commonality on considering social and environmental externalities, which may be achieved by aggregating the best practices. At different decision-making level, the detail of consideration of the externalities should be different. It is intended to develop a generic framework to coordinate the range of existing practices. The standard framework will also be helpful in reducing double counting, which appears in some current practices. Cautions should also be given to the methods of determining the value of social and environmental externalities. A number of methods, such as market price, resource costs and Willingness to Pay, are found in the review. The use of unreasonable monetisation methods in some cases has discredited Benefit Cost Analysis in the eyes of decision makers and the public. Some social externalities, such as employment and regional economic impacts, are generally omitted in current practices. This is due to the lack of information and credible models. It may be appropriate to consider these externalities in qualitative forms in a Multiple Criteria Analysis. Consensus has been reached in considering noise and air pollution in international practices. However, Australia practices generally omitted these externalities. Equity is an important consideration in Road Asset Management. The considerations are either between regions, or social groups, such as income, age, gender, disable, etc. In current practice, there is not a well developed quantitative measure for equity issues. More research is needed to target this issue. Although Multiple Criteria Analysis has been used for decades, there is not a generally accepted framework in the choice of modelling methods and various externalities. The result is that different analysts are unlikely to reach consistent conclusions about a policy measure. In current practices, some favour using methods which are able to prioritise alternatives, such as Goal Programming, Goal Achievement Matrix, Analytic Hierarchy Process. The others just present various impacts to decision-makers to characterise the projects. Weighting and scoring system are critical in most Multiple Criteria Analysis. However, the processes of assessing weights and scores were criticised as highly arbitrary and subjective. It is essential that the process should be as transparent as possible. Obtaining weights and scores by consulting local communities is a common practice, but is likely to result in bias towards local interests. Interactive approach has the advantage in helping decision-makers elaborating their preferences. However, computation burden may result in lose of interests of decision-makers during the solution process of a large-scale problem, say a large state road network. Current practices tend to use cardinal or ordinal scales in measure in non-monetised externalities. Distorted valuations can occur where variables measured in physical units, are converted to scales. For example, decibels of noise converts to a scale of -4 to +4 with a linear transformation, the difference between 3 and 4 represents a far greater increase in discomfort to people than the increase from 0 to 1. It is suggested to assign different weights to individual score. Due to overlapped goals, the problem of double counting also appears in some of Multiple Criteria Analysis. The situation can be improved by carefully selecting and defining investment goals and criteria. Other issues, such as the treatment of time effect, incorporating risk and uncertainty, have been given scant attention in current practices. This report suggested establishing a common analytic framework to deal with these issues.

National practices in investment decision making in road sector

This document provides the findings of a national review of investment decision-making practices in road asset management. Efforts were concentrated on identifying the strategic objectives of agencies in road asset management, establishing and understanding criteria different organisations adopted and ascertaining the exact methodologies used by different sate road authorities. The investment objectives of Australian road authorities are based on triple-bottom line considerations (social, environmental, economic and political). In some cases, comparing with some social considerations, such as regional economic development, equity, and access to pubic service etc., Benefit-Cost Ratio has limited influence on the decision-making. Australian road authorities have developed various decision support tools. Although Multi-Criteria Analysis has been preliminarily used in case by case study, pavement management systems, which are primarily based on Benefit Cost Analysis, are still the main decision support tool. This situation is not compatible with the triple-bottom line objectives. There is need to fill the gap between decision support tools and decision-making itself. Different decision criteria should be adopted based on the contents of the work. Additional decision criteria, which are able to address social, environmental and political impacts, are needed to develop or identify. Environmental issue plays a more and more important role in decision-making. However, the criteria and respective weights in decision-making process are yet to be clearly identified. Social and political impacts resulted from road infrastructure investment can be identified through Community Perceptions Survey. With accumulative data, prediction models, which are similar as pavement performance models, can be established. Using these models, the decision-makers are able to foresee the social and political consequences of investment alternatives.

Brite innovation survey : executive summary

This report summarises the fi ndings of an innovation survey of the Australian construction industry undertaken by the BRITE Project of the CRC for Construction Innovation in 2004. The BRITE Innovation Survey can be viewed in full at www.brite.crcci.info.The objective of the BRITE project is to improve the incidence and quality of innovation in the Australian construction industry. Many stakeholders in the industry are sceptical about the potential for innovation and its likely benefi ts. Many also lack the linkages and capabilities required for successful innovation. The BRITE Project is redressing this situation through demonstration and benchmarking activities. The term ‘innovation’ is defi ned as a new or signifi cantly improved technology or advanced business practice. Innovation may be technological or organisational, and it may be new to the world, or just new to the industry or business concerned. The defi nition includes the adoption of existing advancements developed outside a particular business. The survey sample was drawn from 3,500 businesses in the road/bridge and commercial building sectors in New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland, covering main contractors, trade contractors, consultants, suppliers and clients. Onethird of this population was sampled and a response rate of almost 30% was achieved. The survey collected information about respondents’ perceptions of innovation determinants in the industry, comprising various aspects of business strategy and business environment.

Public policy implications of construction innovation research

This report undertakes an exploratory analysis of Construction Innovation research projects in order to answer the question “What are the public policy implications of Construction Innovation research?”

Wrong way, go back! Negotiating success in industry-based research

Literature addressing methodological issues in organisational research is extensive and multidisciplinary, encompassing debates about methodological choices, data-collection techniques, epistemological approaches and statistical procedures. However, little scholarship has tackled an important aspect of organisational research that precedes decisions about data collection and analysis – access to the organisations themselves, including the people, processes and documents within them. This chapter looks at organisational access through the experiences of three research fellows in the course of their work with their respective industry partners. In doing so, it reveals many of the challenges and changing opportunities associated with access to organisations, which are rarely explicitly addressed, but often assumed, in traditional methods texts and journal publications. Although the level of access granted varied somewhat across the projects at different points in time and according to different organisational contexts, we shared a number of core and consistent experiences in attempting to collect data and implement strategies.

Enhancing research and development: designing collaborative environments for innovation

Work environments have previously been studied to identify the strategies, structures and processes which increase the likelihood of creativity, innovation and collaboration for productive workplaces. A number of perspectives have emerged which identify social and cognitive factors known to contribute to or to restrict innovation and collaboration. Recently more attention has been given to designing physical environments to encourage processes relevant to innovation such as creativity (McCoy & Evans, 2002) knowledge sharing (Hemlin, Allwood & Martin, 2008) and collaboration (Bozeman & Corley, 2004). Some attention has been given specifically to research and development environments (Boutellier et al, 2008) but little integration of this research has occurred. In the context of the construction of new purpose-built premises which will bring together under one roof separate public sector agencies engaged in research and development in agriculture, natural resource systems and the environment, this paper examines the extant literature and develops initial propositions for research relevant to the transition, collaboration and performance of research and development in new organizational environments where traditional boundaries have been redrawn.

A user driven data mining process model and learning system

This paper deals with the problem of using the data mining models in a real-world situation where the user can not provide all the inputs with which the predictive model is built. A learning system framework, Query Based Learning System (QBLS), is developed for improving the performance of the predictive models in practice where not all inputs are available for querying to the system. The automatic feature selection algorithm called Query Based Feature Selection (QBFS) is developed for selecting features to obtain a balance between the relative minimum subset of features and the relative maximum classification accuracy. Performance of the QBLS system and the QBFS algorithm is successfully demonstrated with a real-world application

The challenges of participatory research with ‘tech-savvy’ youth

This paper focuses on participatory research and how it can be understood and employed when researching children and youth. The aim of this paper is to provide a theoretically and empirically grounded discussion of participatory research methodologies with respect to investigating the dynamic and evolving phenomenon of young people growing up in networked societies. Initially, we review the nature of participatory research and how other researchers have endeavoured to involve young people (children and youth) in their research projects. Our review of these approaches aims to elucidate what we see as recurring and emerging issues with respect to the methodological design of involving young people as co-researchers. In the light of these issues and in keeping with our aim, we offer a case study of our own research project that seeks to understand the ways in which high school students use new media and network ICT systems (Internet, mobile phone applications, social networking sites) to construct identities, form social relations, and engage in creative practices as part of their everyday lives. The article concludes by offering an assessment of our tripartite model of participatory research that may benefit other researchers who share a similar interest in youth and new media.

Regulation of human stem cell research in Australia

Australia is currently well placed to contribute to the global growth of human stem cell research. However, as the science has progressed, authorities have had to deal with the ongoing challenges of regulating such a fast moving field of scientific endeavour. Australia’s past and current approach to regulating the use of embryos in human embryonic stem cell research provides an insight into how Australia may continue to adapt to future regulatory challenges presented by human stem cell research. In the broader context, a number of issues have been identified that may impact upon the success of future human stem cell research in Australia.

Defining reference service life : an open innovation approach

The endeavour to obtain estimates of durability of components for use in lifecycle assessment or costing and infrastructure and maintenance planning systems is large. The factor method and the reference service life concept provide a very valuable structure, but do not resolve the central dilemma of the need to derive an extensive database of service life. Traditional methods of estimating service life, such as dose functions or degradation models, can play a role in developing this database, however the scale of the problem clearly indicates that individual dose functions cannot be derived for each component in each different local and geographic setting. Thus, a wider range of techniques is required in order to devise reference service life. This paper outlines the approaches being taken in the Cooperative Research Centre for Construction Innovation project to predict reference service life. Approaches include the development of fundamental degradation and microclimate models, the development of a situation-based reasoning ‘engine’ to vary the ‘estimator’ of service life, and the development of a database on expert performance (Delphi study). These methods should be viewed as complementary rather than as discrete alternatives. As discussed in the paper, the situation-based reasoning approach in fact has the possibility of encompassing all other methods.

Comparative study : health research on traffic noise pollution vs. Technical research on traffic noise mitigation

Community awareness and the perception on the traffic noise related health impacts have increased significantly over the last decade resulting in a large volume of public inquiries flowing to Road Authorities for planning advice. Traffic noise management in the urban environment is therefore becoming a “social obligation”, essentially due to noise related health concerns. Although various aspects of urban noise pollution and mitigation have been researched independently, an integrated approach by stakeholders has not been attempted. Although the current treatment and mitigation strategies are predominantly handled by the Road Agencies, a concerted effort by all stakeholders is becoming mandatory for effective and tangible outcomes in the future. A research project is underway a RMIT University, Australia, led by the second author to consider the use of “hedonic pricing” for alternative noise amelioration treatments within the road reserve and outside the road reserve. The project aims to foster a full range noise abatement strategy encompassing source, path and noise receiver. The benefit of such a study would be to mitigate the problem where it is most effective and would defuse traditional “authority” boundaries to produce the optimum outcome. The project is conducted in collaboration with the Department of Main Roads Queensland, Australia and funded by the CRC for Construction Innovation. As part of this study, a comprehensive literature search is currently underway to investigate the advancements in community health research, related to environmental noise pollution, and the advancements in technical and engineering research in mitigating the issue. This paper presents the outcomes of this work outlining state of the art, national and international good practices and gap analysis to identify major anomalies and developments.

Project diagnostics : assessing the condition of projects and identifying poor health combing forces

In many cases, construction projects do not achieve the objectives that the project participants set for them. If participants could better understand how their project is performing overall, at various stages of its delivery, then the opportunities to achieve project success would almost certainly be greater. This paper documents a method of assessing the status of a project, at a point in its design or construction phase, or after completion. The status is assessed in terms of up to seven (7) key success factors. Any evidence of less than adequate performance in these performance areas is scrutinised to seek out the root causes of why this situation is happening. Using these identified root causes of under performance, general suggestions can then be made as to how to return the project to good health. A software package that assists in assessing the status of the project has been developed. The package is currently being calibrated before commercial release.