A prospective study on building quality : enforcement of control in the Australian housing industry

The Australian housing industry is beset with quality issues with repeated building defects causing problems with customer satisfaction and housing performance. These defects are caused by a combination of initial poor workmanship and poor quality materials and subsequently by poorly executed or inadequate maintenance. These poor work practices increase the cost and maintenance of housing. The waste and rectification work generated by such practices means that the housing industry generally is not engaged with sustainability. Building Control is part of achieving quality of building output. Whilst the Australian Building Code has regulations for initial-build material quality and workmanship, there is no continuing control and effective enforcement over a house over its life span. Sustainability is not dealt with as a topic at all in the Building Code with only energy efficiency concerns regulated. Inadequate knowledge transfer, to the mainly small builders who produce the majority of Australia’s housing, is seen to be a key issue. Mechanisms to make the transfer of knowledge to those who need to use it need to be improved. Building regulations, for example, could be more visual and accessible in their content and small builders should be encouraged to update their knowledge and skills. This comparative research will guide industry service providers in improving their performance and suggest how overall housing quality can be improved (thereby reducing wasteful practices), by considering more appropriate mechanisms for knowledge transfer among industry service providers in the Australian housing industry.

Building surveyors in Australia : an emerging profession

Australian and UK Building Codes undergo revision to improve the health and safety standards in the built environment and reflect wider social and technological changes. In the 1990s both countries changed to the option for designers to provide alternative solutions, where designers provide calculations to demonstrate that the codes are satisfied but not through the traditional deemed to satisfy route. Other social and legislative changes have had an impact on the profession. In the UK the Institute of Building Control, the equivalent of the Australian Institute of Building Surveyors responded by joining the Royal Institution of the Chartered Surveyors. Thus it has become part of the largest surveying professional body, what does that mean for the profession? This paper compares the Australian and UK professions and looks at some of the issues affecting their future direction.

Computer-aided design decision support: interfacing knowledge and information

Computer-aided design decision support has proved to be an elusive and intangible project for many researchers as they seek to encapsulate information and knowledge-based systems as useful multifunctional data structures. Definitions of ‘knowledge', ‘information', ‘facts', and ‘data' become semantic footballs in the struggle to identify what designers actually do, and what level of support would suit them best, and how that support might be offered. The Construction Primer is a database-drivable interactive multimedia environment that provides readily updated access to many levels of information aimed to suit students and practitioners alike. This is hardly a novelty in itself. The innovative interface and metadata structures, however, combine with the willingness of national building control legislators, standards authorities, materials producers, building research organisations, and specification services to make the Construction Primer a versatile design decision support vehicle. It is both compatible with most working methodologies while remaining reasonably future-proof. This paper describes the structure of the project and highlights the importance of sound planning and strict adhesion to library-standard metadata protocols as a means to avoid the support becoming too specific or too paradigmatic.

Defining and developing an energy retrofitting approach

This paper identifies the dilemma faced by the stakeholders of existing buildings in regards to a decision making process for energy retrofitting. This paper also identifies the missing stage viewed as the “integrity audit “which can lead to substantial savings in the area of building operation. The methodology is centered on identifying energy waste first, reducing the overall peak electrical demand and then retrofitting for energy-efficiency. A proposed “integrity audit” leads to the classification of three main energy culprits: the identification of waste, missed opportunities, and rescheduling the operation of equipment use. A case study indicating the financial advantages of applying this methodology for a commercial building are presented. The energy retrofitting strategy is divided into two main categories, namely building control improvements and building component implementation. The payback periods are often within months if not immediate.

Fog computing: a cloud to the ground support for smart things and machine-to-machine networks

Cloud services to smart things face latency and intermittent connectivity issues. Fog devices are positioned between cloud and smart devices. Their high speed Internet connection to the cloud, and physical proximity to users, enable real time applications and location based services, and mobility support. Cisco promoted fog computing concept in the areas of smart grid, connected vehicles and wireless sensor and actuator networks. This survey article expands this concept to the decentralized smart building control, recognizes cloudlets as special case of fog computing, and relates it to the software defined networks (SDN) scenarios. Our literature review identifies a handful number of articles. Cooperative data scheduling and adaptive traffic light problems in SDN based vehicular networks, and demand response management in macro station and micro-grid based smart grids are discussed. Security, privacy and trust issues, control information overhead and network control policies do not seem to be studied so far within the fog computing concept.

A question of continuing control -balancing building quality of housing and building codes

The Building Code of Australia seeks to establish “nationally consistent, minimum necessary standards of relevant, health, safety (including structural safety and safety from fire), amenity and sustainability objectives efficiently”. These goals are laudable – but where are the goals of quality and maintenance, which are also an essential part of achieving adequate and continuing health and safety for the built environment?

Defects such as dampness, settlement and cracking, staining, wood rot, termite damage, rusting, and roof leakage are common enough to suggest that there are still issues with building quality in housing. They are caused by a combination of initial poor workmanship and poor quality materials and latterly by poorly executed or inadequate maintenance.

Local architecture, developed over many years of trial and error, produce buildings linked to their climate and local materials (think of the typical “Queenslander” house). Today’s architecture imports technologies and materials from many differing countries and climates – that are not necessarily suitable for the location, nor is there necessarily the same quality control over the material quality and production. Inappropriate use and inadequate understanding of new materials and techniques can lead to the generation of further defects.

Whilst the building code contains provisions for initial-build material quality and workmanship, there is no continuing control over a house over its life span. Reliance is placed on advertising the need, for example, to employ qualified tradespeople; replace batteries in smoke detectors; and other good advice to help maintain housing to a minimum standard. Is this sufficient?

Mechanisms to make the transfer of knowledge to those who need to use it – be it the workforce or the houseowner – need to be improved. Should the building code be more visual and accessible in it’s content? Should the building code include provisions for maintenance? Should the building code require every house to have a “users manual” – much like a car? An extensive review of literature identifies the scale of the problem of poor quality housing and highlights some suggested causes – inadequate knowledge of the BCA by general housebuilders being one. However little work has been done to investigate what could be done to improve the situation. This work suggests that improvements to knowledge transfer would improve the quality of housing and a model of the knowledge transfer process is proposed, identifying those areas where the knowledge flows need to occur that would impact both the builders and users of housing.

Building health promoting work settings : identifying the relationship between work characteristics and occupational stress in Australia

Occupational stress is a serious threat to the health of individual workers, their families and the community at large. The settings approach to health promotion offers valuable opportunities for developing comprehensive strategies to prevent and reduce job stress. However, there is evidence that many workplace health promotion programs adopt traditional, lifestyle-oriented strategies when dealing with occupational stress, and ignore the impact that the setting itself has on the health of employees. The aim of the present study was to address two of the barriers to adopting the settings approach; namely the lack of information on how psycho-social work characteristics can influence health, and not having the confidence or knowledge to identify or address organizational-level issues. A comprehensive occupational stress audit involving qualitative and quantitative research methods was undertaken in a small- to medium-sized public sector organization in Australia. The results revealed that the work characteristics ‘social support’ and ‘job control’ accounted for large proportions of explained variance in job satisfaction and psychological health. In addition to these generic variables, several job-specific stressors were found to be predictive of the strain experienced by employees. When coupled with the results of other studies, these findings suggest that work characteristics (particularly control and support) offer valuable avenues for creating work settings that can protect and enhance employee health. The implications of the methods used to develop and complete the stress audit are also discussed.

State sovereignty and migration control: the ultimate act of discrimination?

Nations zealously guard their borders and carefully vet migrants. This consigns many people to live in states not of their choice and often diminishes their opportunities and their level of flourishing. In some cases it is the difference between life and death. The practice of imposing migration controls is discriminatory. In fact it is the ultimate form of discrimination: 'super-discrimination.' There is no logical or moral reason why non-nationals of a state should not have the same opportunities and freedoms as nationals in that state. One of the most common forms of discrimination is race - treating a person differently simply because of their place of birth. This is one of the clearest and most repugnant forms of discrimination because the location where a person is born is of course merely a happy or unhappy circumstance over which the individual has no control. An accident of birth should not qualify a person for extra privileges or opportunities. The world is a fairer place if to the maximum extent possible luck is taken out of the process for allocating benefits and burdens - which ought to be distributed on the basis of merit and dessert. This paper examines whether there are sound reasons for restricting the flow of world-wide people movement. The main arguments in favour of this policy, relating to security and national building, are ultimately flawed. This exposes a tragic irony given the great efforts that many Western states - which typically have the strongest migration controls - make to stamp out discrimination at the domestic level, and the vast array of international law anti-discrimination instruments, loudly trumpeted by Western nations. This is hypocrisy nearing its finest. The substratum of sovereign states upon which available international law is built is inherently discriminatory and in fact is probably responsible for more harm as a result of the innately discriminatory immigration policies than results from the cumulative operation of all domestic discrimination. The world should move towards loosening migration controls. This would have an enormous number of humanistic benefits, not the least of which is largely eradicating world hunger and poverty.

Organizational change in the public sector: augmenting the demand control model to predict employee outcomes under New Public Management

This study identifies the environmental and personal characteristics that predict employee outcomes within an Australian public sector organization that had, under New Public Management (NPM), implemented a variety of practices traditionally found in the private sector. These are more results-oriented, and their adoption can be accompanied by increased strain for employees. The current investigation was guided by two complementary theories, the Demand Control Support (DCS) model and Conservation of Resources (COR) theory, and sought to examine the benefits of building on the DCS to include both situation-specific stressors and internal coping resources. Survey responses from 1,155 employees were analysed. The hierarchical regression analyses indicated that both external and employee-centred variables made significant contributions to variations in psychological health, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment. The external resources, work based support and, to a lesser extent, job control, predicted relatively large proportions of the variance in the target variables. The situation-specific stressors, particularly those involving harmful management practices (e.g., insufficient time to do job as well as you would like, lack of recognition for good work), made significant contributions to the outcome measures and generally supported the process of augmenting the generic components of the DCS with more situation-specific variables. In terms of internal resources, problem and emotion-based coping improved the capacity of the model to predict psychological health. The results suggest that the impact of NPM can be ameliorated by incorporating the dimensions of the augmented DCS and coping resources into the change programme.

Building registration: training and housing quality

The lack of attention to quality control by house builders has been a contentious issue for more than three decades. In an attempt to improve the quality of housing, various mechanisms have been adopted and discarded by industry-based organizations and government legislation. Now that registration of builders has been achieved (since 1995) the regulating authority, the Building Commission have placed the maintenance of standards from registered builders at the forefront of their priorities. The provision of suitable training and continuing professional development programs is likely to receive greater attention over the next few years. However, a key factor that is often overlooked in the debate on quality of house construction is the use of subcontract labour by both, registered builders and owner builders. The repetitive nature of some activities ensures that tacit knowledge within the subcontract system becomes an integral part of house construction. Research by the authors into defects in housing has provided some interesting analyses from the statistic collected. This paper analyses the incidence of defects over a number of years in a range of functional elements within the house envelope and presents the results. Particular attention is paid to the incidence of defects where the licensed trades are involved compared to the non-licensed trades and elements. This work suggests where housing defects are likely to occur and the authors suggest that appropriate educational resources may be directed to areas where it will be most effective and beneficial. The authors propose a more integrated and inclusive approach.

Salvage material logistics management for building demolition project

Building demolition imposes substantial environmental impacts. In particular, large amount of demolition wastes are disposed to landfills. A solution to ease the situation is to maximally reuse and recycle waste building material. Management philosophies such as Just-in-time are applied into demolition project management in order to promote reuse and recycling of demolition wastes. Transportation logistics, widely applied in the manufacturing industry, is ideal to be adopted into demolition projects to optimise waste material production, inventorying, and transportation. In particular, it enables right types and amounts of dismantled building materials to be transferred to right location, and at right time, as required by material demanders. Consequently, waste reuse and recycling can be facilitated. Furthermore, logistics management helps the demolition project team to reduce cost, shorten project duration, and satisfy material demanders. Transportation planning concerns thorough preparation technically and managerially on the demolition site for transportation activities. Information exchange is playing a significant role in delivering and sharing information among project participants, including building owner, demolition project team, potential material demanders, and transporters. This research paper aims to identify the role of transportation logistics in a building demolition project and to analyse inventory control, transportation, and various technical aspects of logistic management for demolition wastes.

Electronic waste exchange for just-in-time building demolition

Waste exchange is as a facilitator for construction and demolition waste deduction by reuse and recycling in construction projects. The just-in-time philosophy, which has been well cultivated in the manufacturing industry, is highly adoptable for demolition projects. Particularly, waste exchange that is usually performed after the actual demolition process can be shifted forward so that waste inventory from demolition is eliminated or reduced to facilitate waste reuse and recycling. A web-based waste exchange system is an ideal platform to enable communications among project participants before a demolition project commences so that waste materials can be sold before they are produced. Therefore, the productivity of the demolition project could be improved. This research paper aims to investigate and analyse the adoption of just-in-time philosophy in building demolition project management. It also describes the development of the proposed web-based waste exchange system that implements just-in-time demolition in detail, including its functionalities, information flows and major components.

Performance of a 120 m2 solar air heater for a commercial building in Victoria

The operation of two 60 m² solar air heaters serving a large studio teaching space has been monitored for a twelve month period. The solar contribution of the heaters was found to be less than 5%, and in some instances the heaters actually contributed to the space heating load. A validated mathematical model of the studio and it’s heating, ventilation and air conditioning system was used to investigate performance improvement strategies. It was found a different control strategy and recommissioned control sensors would substantially improve the solar air heater performance.