Time and Cost Performance in Construction Projects in Southern and Central Regions of Peninsular Malaysia

Time and cost performance is the fundamental criteria for success of any project. Unfortunately construction industry in Malaysia has been regarded as industry facing poor performance leading to failure in achieving effective time and cost performance. As a consequence most of the project face huge amount of time and cost overrun. This study assessed the time and cost performance of construction projects in Malaysia using structured questionnaire survey. The findings of study revealed that 92% of construction projects were overrun and only 8% of project could achieve completion within contract duration. The amount of time overrun was in between 5-10% as agreed by respondents. In terms of cost performance only 11% of respondents mentioned that normally their projects are finished within the budgeted cost while 89% of respondents agreed that their projects were facing the problem of cost overrun with average overrun at 5-10% of contract price.  The major contributors of this poor performance include design and documentation issues, financial resource management and project management and contract administration issues. Further, qualitative study was carried out using semi-structured interviews with the experience personnel involving in managing construction project which resulted in developing 13 mitigation measure to improve time performance and 15 mitigation measure to improve cost performance in construction project. This study will help the practitioners to implement the mitigation measure at planning stage in order to achieve successful construction projects

Perception of Health-Impacts of Environmental Noise in an Ambient Noise Context in Owerri -Urban , Imo State, Nigeria

This paper reports the results of the investigation of health impacts of environmental noise context in Owerri-urban, due to incessant complains of urban dwellers of noise pollution and their effects on the health. This was measured by the use of 210 questionnaires on urban dwellers along the major routes, in which 30 questionnaires  were randomly  administered  between sampled routes designated  NP1- NP7. The observed results indicate that , automobile  has 32.3%, church 3.3%, construction work 19.5%, market 5.7%, industrial activities 9.0%, hawking 10%, and school 6.6%, with  automobile recording the highest response as  the main source of environmental noise pollution and church having the least response. For the perceived health problems caused by environmental noise, the results further shown that  Cardiovascular and Physiological effects constituted 20.5%, Hearing Impairment 25.2%, Sleeplessness 21.9%, mental health 11.4%, annoyance 6.6% and human performance 14.2%, with hearing impairment  ranking the highest  and the lowest being annoyance. Environmental noise was  at the peak between the hours of 8- 11 am constituting 49.1%. The hours between 3-7 pm constitutes 39.5%, while <10pm has 11.4% indicating noise pollution is less in the evening time of the day where people are indoor for rest. These then calls for best management practice like enforcement of pollution law, maintenance of vehicles and creation of awareness on health implications of environmental noise

Fuzzy and Interval Finite Element Method for Heat Conduction Problem

Traditional finite element method is a well-established method to solve various problems of science and engineering. Different authors have used various methods to solve governing differential equation of heat conduction problem.  In this study, heat conduction in a circular rod has been considered which is made up of two different materials viz. aluminum and copper. In earlier studies parameters in the differential equation have been taken as fixed (crisp) numbers which actually may not. Those parameters are found in general by some measurements or experiments. So the material properties are actually uncertain and may be considered to vary in an interval or as fuzzy and in that case complex interval arithmetic or fuzzy arithmetic has to be considered in the analysis. As such the problem is discretized into finite number of elements which depend on interval/fuzzy parameters. Representation of interval/fuzzy numbers may give the clear picture of uncertainty. Hence interval/fuzzy arithmetic is applied in the finite element method to solve a steady state heat conduction problem. Application of fuzzy finite element method in the said problem gives fuzzy system of linear equations in general. Here new methods have also been proposed to handle such type of fuzzy system of linear equations. Corresponding results are computed and has been reported here