Purpose –This study aims to identify and assess the most important factors affecting the quality of construction projects in Lebanon before and after the economic crisis (in 2019), and to determine their impact on the cost overrun of the project. Design/Methodology/Approach –A quantitative statistical analysis was conducted to achieve the research objectives through a survey of 22 factors (distributed under 6 categories) filled out by 80 engineers working in the construction field. Collected data were used to rank and categorize these factors and to determine their impact on the cost overrun ...

Sustainable development has been tackled for the last four decades in various fields from education, management, climate change to politics all over the world. One of the major challenges faced by humanity nowadays is achieving the economic sustainability of our infrastructure facilities. To fulfill it, an economic tool called Life Cycle Cost Analysis (LCCA), which takes into account all costs of an asset during its lifetime, is being used. In some countries, this technique is being incorporated in the procurement. It is used as a decisive factor in the procurement of their infrastructure ...

The main and overarching objective of this research endeavor is to devise data-driven soft modeling tools that can provide fast, fairly accurate and computationally efficient predictions for: (1) the thermal conductivity of particulate composites (PC), and (2) the level of shielding provided by a porous structure from a high-yield explosion. The computational tools developed in this work constitute cheaper and faster alternatives to the relatively large and cumbersome numerical simulations or experimental testing campaigns that would otherwise be needed to make predictions of comparable ...

Civil infrastructure systems such as transportation networks, power gridlines, water and wastewater networks, telecommunication services are vital modules creating the backbones of modern cities. Transportation networks are key components of civil infrastructure systems that can impede societal and commercial events, and impair post-disaster evacuation, response and recovery. Performance of transportation networks under natural hazards shed light on the necessity to assess their fundamental topological properties in order to provide and correlate appropriate resilience measurements to comprehend ...