Status Analysis and Trend Prediction for the Labor Costs of Chinese Construction Industry
Chinese huge low-cost labor force provided motive power for the development of construction industry in the past decades. However, Chinese labor costs soar quickly in recent years, which bring pressures to construction enterprises. In order to analyze the problems of rising labor costs of Chinese construction industry in depth, a questionnaire survey is conducted among construction workers and project managers. According to the result of the investigation and statistical data, the rising actuality and influence factors of labor costs in Chinese construction industry are analyzed comprehensively. Then the medium and long term prediction of labor cost is carried out by using GM (1, 1) grey model. The results show that the average pay of Chinese construction workers rose quickly over the past 5 years. Changes of supply–demand relation of labor force, soaring prices and the rapid economic development, and other aspects are the reasons causing the labor costs increase. The average daily pay of Chinese construction workers will keep rising in coming years, and will achieve 337 RMB yuan by 2020. The research results present valuable reference basis for construction enterprises to grasp the development trend of labor costs and takes steps to address the labor cost pressures.
Analysis of Factors Influencing Productivity Using Craftsmen Questionnaires: Case Study in a Chilean Construction Company
Improvement of productivity in construction has been a major industry challenge, given its high impact on project results. It has received increased attention from construction researchers promoting different enhancement actions, since analyzing factors affecting labor productivity is an instrumental part in this process. This paper focuses on identifying and understanding the productivity factors affecting projects in a Chilean construction company on the basis of questionnaires administered to both direct workers and midlevel employees. Analysis of the questionnaire results helped to determine organizational and managerial weaknesses and facilitated comparison of the findings with previous productivity studies. The results proved to be useful in developing recommendations for productivity improvements. The main findings indicate that the critical areas affecting construction productivity were related to materials, tools, rework, equipment, truck availability, and the workers' motivational dynamics. These results are similar to those obtained in previous studies in the United States and in Chile. Salary expectations were found to be the main reason for turnover in the studied company, which was an aspect not mentioned in previous studies. Finally, additional analyses seem to show that some factors affecting productivity are common to construction projects across boundaries, therefore validating data aggregation and the possibility of learning from experiences in different locations and even separated in time of occurrence.
RDF Keyword Search based on Keywords-To-SPARQL Translation
In this paper, we present a summary of our work on RDF keyword search. Given a set of keywords, our method automatically generates a set of candidate SPARQL queries, and their natural language description, to be evaluated on the RDF data graph. We discuss our approach, highlighting current and future directions.