Legal implications of adopting Building Information Modeling (BIM)

Building Information Modeling (BIM) is an innovative approach to design and construct buildings, which has changed the practices within the construction industry. Different categories of stakeholders, such as architects, construction companies, professional associations, academia and even the policymakers, who have defined national policies and strategy documents to facilitate the BIM adoption, have been interested to understand BIM and its implications for the business environment. The legal implications of adopting BIM in construction projects represent one of the most recently discussed issues, which is still not fully understood and not followed by concrete risk mitigation actions. The paper intends to underline some of the legal implications of adopting BIM, mainly in relation to the procurement and contract strategies. The paper concludes that it is expected that BIM will bring more transparency in the construction project implementation and will enable a more comprehensive audit trail leading to fewer legal disputes

An Ontological-based Model for Competences in Sustainable Development Projects: a Case Study for Project’s Commercial Activities

The paper presents a project management competencies model, using an ontological approach. The ontology, named PMCatalog, was developed in the framework of the project CONTO, financed by Romanian through the grant 91-037/2007. PMCatalog is consistent with the competence definition and PM competence elements included in the International Competence Baseline, the competency standard of the International Project Management Association. The main PMCatalog’s use cases for commercial activities in sustainable development projects are described. Ontology was developed using the Protégé editor.competence, project management, sustainable development, commercial activities

FIDIC contracts: analysis of the impact of general and particular conditions on the financial risk management in Romanian infrastructure projects

Construction projects are characterized by risks and uncertainties mainly due to technical and economic complexity. Risk management is an important tool in making decisions involving the identification and reduction, avoidance or transfer risk and uncertainties consequences of events that occurs during project implementation. For this reason, the objective of the contract between the beneficiary and the contractor is the allocation of risk. The distribution of risk in contracts for the execution of construction works was and is an ongoing challenge faced by parties having a significant impact on the type of contract is used. On the one hand, the beneficiaries tend to transfer to the contractors as many of the project risks and uncertainties, on the other hand, the contractors look to exploit any weakness contract, so as to reduce their impact on the expected profit. One of the most important risks assumed by the contractor by signing the contract which is also increasingly common in the current economic situation is the reduced financial capacity to support the project. A purely legal or purely technical interpretation is not meant to describe the complexity of issues related to implementation of construction projects. For this reason the authors have adopted a multi-disciplinary approach, which includes the legal issues related to the nature of the contract, but also the financial and technical aspects of construction projects. The paper aims to analyze how special contract clauses can influence the implementation of construction projects and in particular the financial management of contractors. The authors propose a model for analyzing the impact of FIDIC contract conditions applied on a case study of five transport infrastructure projects

Lifelong Learning and Employability in the Danube Region Countries: Influences and Correlations

A continuous challenge for education and lifelong learning is to assist individuals in acquiring skills and knowledge for successful work life, especially after the financial crisis which influenced negatively the employment growth in all European Union countries. The paper focuses on finding correlations between employability and lifelong learning in the Danube Region countries of the European Union and more explicitly in the ex-communist ones of this region. As research instruments, two online questionnaires were built based on a thorough literature review and a set of structured interviews and filled in by 390 IT students and 55 IT professors. The surveys’ results revealed a clear positive correlation between the level of education and the opinion about the importance of obtaining a job as a result of the educational endeavors. A special attention in the survey was given to social networks, which were acknowledged as modern facilitators of lifelong learning activities. The conclusions of the current study are particularly important in the Romanian context, as the employment rate of recent graduates is in a decreasing trend, but also for all the Danube Region ex-communist countries, which have to boost their employment rates as well, to assure their economical growth. Identification of factors stimulating employment of young people according with their education contributes at the sustainable economic growth of these countries, at the growth of graduates insertion in the labor market and at the diminution of labor migration

Simulation-Based E-Learning Framework for Entrepreneurship Education and Training

The paper proposes an e-Learning framework in entrepreneurship. The framework has three main components, for identification the business opportunities, for developing business scenarios and for risk analysis. A common database assures the components integration. The main components of this framework are already available; the main challenging for those interested in using them is to design an integrated flow of activities, adapted with their curricula and other educational settings. The originality of the approach is that the framework is domain independent and uses advanced IT technologies, such as recommendation algorithms, agent-based simulations and extended graphical support. Using this e-learning framework, the students can learn how to choose relevant characteristics/aspects for a type of business and how important is each of them according specific criteria; how to set realistic values for different characteristics/aspects of the business, how a business scenario can be changed in order to fit better to the business context and how to assess/evaluate business scenarios