Sustainable construction management: introduction of the operational context space (OCS)

Mohamed Matar, Maged Georgy and Moheeb Elsaid Ibrahim

Construction Management and Economics, 2008, vol. 26, issue 3, 261-275

Abstract: Sustainable construction is an emerging field of science that aims at incorporating the general sustainable development concepts into conventional construction practices. While the foundation of knowledge in this field is continuously expanding, sustainable construction is not yet standard industry practice. One major technical barrier that hinders enacting sustainable construction is the absence of an application framework that integrates both sustainability and construction practices at an operational level. This shortcoming is being addressed through a three-dimensional operational context space (OCS) that achieves the sought integration aspect. The three dimensions of OCS are: (1) project life cycle phases; (2) project executing entities; and (3) sustainability performance parameters. Such OCS facilitates the association of responsibility, by assigning each sustainability requirement to a specific project entity (or entities) during specific project phase(s), and further provides a numerical assessment for construction projects using sustainability as a criterion. Steps of constructing the OCS and how it could be employed in the evaluation and benchmarking of a project's environmental performance are examined, along with sample illustrations in the area of construction waste management.

Keywords: Sustainability; sustainable construction; environmental impact; integration; benchmarking (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01446190701842972 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:conmgt:v:26:y:2008:i:3:p:261-275

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RCME20

DOI: 10.1080/01446190701842972

Access Statistics for this article

Construction Management and Economics is currently edited by Will Hughes

More articles in Construction Management and Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().