Scoring Design-Build Proposals for Military Construction Projects

This is a manuscript of an article published as Gransberg, D.D., “Scoring Design-Build Proposals for Military Construction Projects,” The Military Engineer, SAME, Vol. 93 (609), January-February, 2001, pp.23-24.</p

Carbon Footprint Cost Index: A Pavement Case Study

Public projects for pavement and pavement maintenance are often based on budgets set by capital improvement budgets. A better way for determining the cost of sustainability in infrastructure costs is needed. The capital budget limitation causes an issue for the owner. The municipality must construct projects with a focus solely on initial cost and cannot include sustainability requirements due to the perceived additional cost. Sustainability can often be viewed as subjective. Utilizing the carbon footprint as the basis for the decision creates a much more objective evaluation of sustainability in pavements. A case study illustrating a carbon footprint cost index is presented

Quantifying Mega-Project Value for Money: Design-Build Versus Public Private Partnership Delivery Methods

Public agencies must justify the decisions they make to their constituents by demonstrating each project delivery decision’s value for money (VfM). In the traditional low bid procurement VfM is assured to the public via free and open competition to obtain the best price. Public private partnership (P3) project delivery challenges the idea that value is totally defined by minimizing project capital cost and permits public agencies to extend the value calculus beyond construction completion to the development, design, operations and maintenance phases of a project. P3 also furnishes access to private financing, which decreases the burden to the taxpayer and serves to cover current public funding shortfalls. This study compares the VfM of a P3 mega-project in Pennsylvania to that of a comparable design-build (DB) mega-project in Missouri. The paper seeks to determine the change in VfM when private financing and post-construction maintenance are added to the equation. The paper finds that additional VfM is realized through P3 delivery due to being able to build the infrastructure earlier because of the availability of private financing. The paper also finds putting the concessionaire at risk for maintenance costs influenced the concessionaire to implement higher standard design criteria as measured by an increased bridge design life to minimize life cycle cost risk. The paper’s primary contribution is the development of an approach to quantify VfM using comparative value analysis

A Framework to Reconcile Green Goals with Budget Reality

A public agency that decides to implement green design and construction features in its capital improvement program is actually adding an undetermined incremental cost to the initial cost of public buildings. Past research has portrayed these costs as a percentage increase, essentially creating an overall contingency for green buildings, but no work has been done to quantify the incremental cost on a building\u27s actual design program that can be assigned directly to the project budget. This research sought to provide an objective approach to estimating sustainable design and proposes a framework for estimating the initial capital costs of sustainable building design and construction as measured by the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification program. The framework allows tracking of costs during design and can be utilized for estimating future projects. The framework is developed using case study analysis of green building projects in OK City, Oklahoma. The paper concludes that the cost of “going green” can be estimated as a unit price basis as a cost per LEED credit. The proposed framework can be used by any public agency to determine the additional cost of LEED certification and for budgeting future projects

Contractor-Furnished Compaction Testing: Searching for Correlations Between Potential Alternatives to the Nuclear Density Gauge in Missouri Highway Projects

The Missouri Department of Transportation’s (MoDOT) past and present Quality Control and Quality Assurance programs for construction are examined. MoDOT’s present Quality Management program along with a small number of grading projects has lowered the number of Quality Assurance (QA) soil compaction tests completed in the past two years. The Department would like to rid itself of using the Nuclear Density Gauges because of burdensome Federal regulations, required training, security and licensing fees. Linear and multiple regression analysis was performed to see if a correlation between nuclear density gauge dry densities values and Light Weight Deflectometer modulus values/ Clegg Hammer Clegg Impact Values exist. These relationships or lack thereof will determine the technology used by construction contractors to perform compaction quality control testing if MoDOT moves away from using nuclear density gauges for soil density verification

A Comparative Analysis of Alliancing and Integrated Project Delivery on Complex Projects: Parallel Systems Sharing a Common Objective

Relational contracting methods are a natural evolution from the many versions of project delivery that have been developed over the past two decades aimed at increasing the amount of integration and collaboration among mega-project stakeholders. Alliancing was born in the 1990’s in North Sea oilfields and imported down under to Australia and New Zealand where it has used to deliver over 300 complex projects. The litigious environment present in the North American construction sector led project owners to implement partnering programs to enhance the quality of relationships on projects of all sizes delivered using the full spectrum of delivery methods. Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) made its appearance in 2002, employing nonbinding partnering program objectives into multi-party relational contracts. While developed separately, alliancing and IPD share the same objective: an environment where decisions are made on a “best-for-project” basis and all stakeholders share the both the pain and the gain associated with ultimate project performance. This paper chronicles the evolution of project delivery methods, as well as their successes and failures. The paper finds that each approach has been tailored to maximize collaboration within each culture’s legal and business environment. It also finds that alliancing appears to offer the most advantages and has a well-documented record of success. Lastly, the paper recommends that the commercial building project IPD currently used in North America needs to be revised to increase its potential on complex megaprojects

Life cycle cost evaluation of alternatives to the nuclear density gauge for compaction testing on design-build projects

When Missouri Department of Transportation (MoDOT) implemented design–build (DB) contracting, it revised its quality assurance programme and shifted most of the compaction testing to the design-builder. As a result, fewer compaction tests were performed by state personnel and the need for speedy quality control testing by the agency to facilitate construction production disappeared. This paper reports the results of a study conducted by the department to evaluate three alternatives to the nuclear density gauge (NDG) using life cycle cost analysis and cost index number theory. The study’s objective was to investigate alternative soil compaction test devices and provide input to a decision regarding whether or not MoDOT should retain or replace the NDG. Despite the NDG successful track record, the ease of employment and speed with which the compaction results are delivered comes with a price in terms of life cycle costs. The NDG is regulated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and entails an onerous, ongoing administrative workload to permit its continued use. The NDG also incurs additional certification, storage and disposal costs, not found in non-nuclear compaction testing alternatives. This paper reports the results of a life cycle cost analysis of NDG and three alternatives: dynamic cone penetrometer (DCP), electrical density gauge and the sand cone (SC). The study finds that the SC and DCP are the most cost-effective but are the least cost-effective when measured on a basis of timely results. Thus, the NDG replacement/retention decision becomes one of how fast are compaction tests required by the agency. Since MoDOT has adopted contractor acceptance testing in its DB program, it now only conducts verification testing of contractor test results. Thus, the paper recommends that the NDG be replaced

Managing geotechnical risk on US design-build transport projects

Awarding design-build (DB) contracts before a complete subsurface investigation is completed, makes mitigating the risk of differing site conditions difficult, if not impossible. The purpose of the study was to identify effective practices for managing geotechnical risk in DB projects, and it reports the results of a survey that included responses from 42 of 50 US state departments of transportation and a content analysis of DB requests for proposals from 26 states to gauge the client’s perspective, as well as 11 structured interviews with DB contractors to obtain the perspective from the other side of the DB contract. A suite of DB geotechnical risk manage tools is presented based on the results of the analysis. Effective practices were found in three areas: enhancing communications on geotechnical issues before final proposals are submitted; the use of project-specific differing site conditions clauses; and expediting geotechnical design reviews after award. The major finding is that contract verbiage alone is not sufficient to transfer the risk of changed site conditions. The agency must actively communicate all the geotechnical information on hand at the time of the DB procurement and develop a contract strategy that reduces/retires the risk of geotechnical uncertainty as expeditiously as possible after award

Indefinite Delivery-Indefinite Quantity Contracting: A Case Study Analysis

Indefinite delivery-indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contracts permit a transportation agency to award multiple job orders to a single contractor or a small group of competing contractors; this method eliminates the need to conduct a full procurement for every small construction or maintenance project. During the past few years, this procurement method has been increasingly accepted by state and municipal agencies. However, little research has been conducted to provide guidance on this powerful procurement tool. On the basis of a detailed case study analysis, this paper discusses four models for IDIQ contracting in use by three state departments of transportation and FHWA\u27s Central Federal Lands Highway Division, Lakewood, Colorado. The analysis revealed that, regardless of the model in use, agency IDIQ project managers believed that the method accelerated the project delivery period, reduced preconstruction costs, and provided for flexible delivery scheduling. The use of multiple-award IDIQ contracts was also found to promote price competition and reduce the risk of contractor default

Asset Management Program Enhancement Plan: Baseline Assessment Phases I and II

This project resulted in the development of a framework for making asset management decisions on low-volume bridges. The research focused on low-volume bridges located in the agricultural counties of Iowa because recent research has shown that these counties have the greatest percentage of structurally deficient bridges in the nation. Many of the same counties also have the highest crop yields in the state, creating a situation where detours caused by deficient bridges on farm-to-market roads increase the cost to transport the crops. Thus, the research proposed the use of social return on investment (SROI), a tool used by international institutions such as the World Bank, as an asset management metric to gauge to the socioeconomic impact of structurally deficient bridges on the state in an effort to provide quantified justification to fund improvements on low-volume assets such as these rural bridges. The study found that combining SROI with current asset management metrics like average daily traffic (ADT) made it possible to prioritize the bridges in such a way that the limited resources available are allocated in a manner that promotes a more equitable distribution and that directly benefits the user, in this case Iowa farmers. The result is a system that more closely aligns itself with the spirit of MAP-21, in that infrastructure investments are used to facilitate economic growth for Iowa’s agricultural economy