Anil Sawhney - US grants

Growth and the replacement of people leaving the labor force will add more than 68,000 new positions for civil engineers by the year 2005, according to a recent forecast of employment trends (ASCE, 1996). Attracting talented high school graduates and imparting the best possible civil engineering education is critical to the future of the U.S. construction industry. Studies conducted by researchers reveal that civil and construction engineering education should include practicality and feel for construction, creative thinking and problem solving, engineering judgment, and practitioner involvement. In reality, civil and construction engineering undergraduate curriculums are inadequate in providing students with the necessary construction management skills and experience. The goal of this project is to incorporate practical content in the civil and construction engineering thus bridging the gap between the classroom and the construction site. The project seeks to accomplish this important goal through the development of an integrated educational framework for the civil and construction engineering curricula that will serve as a national model. The two main activities of the project are: 1) to develop an Internet-based Interactive Construction Management Learning System; and 2) to develop an advising and mentorship program that will enhance practitioner involvement. The Interactive Learning System will focus on using interactive and adaptive learning environment to train students in the area of planning of construction processes. Tools that will be used in the development of the system will include multimedia, internet based computing, relational databases, simulation, and gaming. It will provide a real world environment requiring the use of multiple tools. The Interactive Learning System will be incorporated into the construction engineering and management curricula at Western Michigan University. The computer package, course material, and findings of the project will also be disseminated to unive rsities offering civil and construction engineering curricula at the national level. Evaluation instruments will be utilized to evaluate the learning and cost effectiveness of the proposed educational framework. This project provides an innovative methodology that utilizes the knowledge and guidance of industry experts, state-of-the art active learning paradigms, advanced computing tools, and skills of the university faculty to enrich the undergraduate engineering education.

This award provides funding for a three-year REU Site in Construction, at Arizona State University, under the direction of Dr. Anil Sawhney. The 10-week on-site summer program will involve 10 undergraduate students each year in the individual research projects of 12 faculty members. A key focus of the REU site will be studies and research in areas that are of significance to the construction industry. Research activities include an orientation workshop, participating faculty presentations, 9-week individual research program, interaction with current graduate students, workshop on construction management, biweekly research seminars, final research presentation, and final panel discussion of contruction industry experts describing the current status of the industry and its research needs.

Engineering - Civil (54)

This project is producing an integrated educational framework to expose construction management students to the complexities of the construction site. The project is accomplishing this important goal through the development of a prototype web-based construction management gaming system - called WebProject - that integrates construction estimating, construction scheduling, and construction project management courses. Students entering the sequence of construction core courses receive a hypothetical construction project generated by WebProject that is utilized in the three courses. Teams of students undertake the role of construction management companies to perform construction estimating, construction scheduling, and construction project management functions by using the services of hypothetical trade contractors generated by WebProject.

BE/MUSES: Decision-support for Urban Development: Air Quality, social Justice, Material and energy and the Impact of Social Decision-making.

The focus of this BE/MUSES planning grant will be to create a prototype tool that integrates air pollution models, material and energy flow analyses, and an urban development model. The ultimate outcome is aimed at developing decision support tools for environmental management of urban systems. Such tools are expected to encourage planners to choose more renewable resources and reduce waste generation, with the ultimate goal of reducing the environmental impacts of the built environment during rapid urbanization. The research is to explore the urban funnel concept with urban metabolism metrics and visualization tools, while calibrating and validating UrbanSim, a model that predicts urban growth by simulating the interaction of social-decision-making, land development and transportation activities. The goal is also to predict spatial and temporal distribution of major air pollutants, as well as sustainability metrics such as water usage and solid waste generation. Collaboration with a regional planning agency that works with Greater Phoenix municipalities will provide assessment of the models developed. Broader impacts include education for graduate and undergraduate students as well as outreach to K-12 students and teachers, the general public, and urban planners in the Phoenix area. This planning award is co-managed by Robert O'Connor in SES / SBE and Tom Waite in BES / ENG.

Infrastructure construction globally over the next several decades will occur primarily in the developing world. The resulting demand for construction materials, energy, and water, and the resulting global pollution load, must be addressed on the front end to seek sustainable approaches. We must come to understand how to design and build infrastructure so as to accomplish the lofty objectives of the infrastructure itself, while at the same time finding approaches that maximize the investment impact while preserving social and political acceptance and the needs of the environment. Developing countries present unique development challenges in the efficient, affordable, and sustainable delivery of infrastructure especially due to weak government institutions, low-income economies, lower productivity, negligible private sector participation, and higher unemployment. And, while it is true that the infrastructure itself, upon completion, fuels economic growth, the process of constructing that infrastructure can have powerful impacts on national capacity of the construction industry. In addition to the direct gains which can be obtained by solving these riddles, it is also true that US infrastructure construction will be a continuing significant national expense into the foreseeable future, so the lessons learned from US technological leadership in developing country settings can also be transferred to US infrastructure projects. The challenges created by these critical problems must be addressed in a systematic way, but at present there is no broadly understood research agenda.

A workshop will be conducted to provide this agenda. A Workshop Advisory Panel (WAP) has already been established for this purpose. The workshop will focus on two broad themes of research. The first research theme is focused upon broadening the global capacity for engineering design and construction to accelerate the pace of knowledge creation. The second research theme is focused upon redefining the role of the civil and construction engineering community in an interdisciplinary setting consisting of economists, public policy experts, social scientists, and financial experts. In general, educational systems in the United States have an excellent record of preparing engineers for the technical challenges they will face. The workshop is planned to take place in Washington DC in fall 2007. The participants will include industry professionals, university researchers, graduate and undergraduate students, lead experts from sponsoring agencies, international development agencies, and members from research organizations. Students will be engaged in the process as participants and assistants.

Intellectual Merit: Developing countries represent a significant opportunity for growth in the future and it is important to consider strategies both for building sustainable infrastructures and for broadening participation in the solutions identified. How to explore and establish the appropriate technological and economic level of infrastructure capacity is a challenge that will be addressed by this workshop. This workshop will also create a new body of knowledge specifically related to infrastructure development issues in developing countries.

Broader Impacts: This workshop is focused upon training and educating future scholars and leaders in successful infrastructure development and growth in developing countries. Because the problem itself is so critical, and because its solution utterly depends on expanding the diversity of participation in its solution, the impacts are inherently broader than the knowledge created itself. Practitioners, faculty, and students from different countries will participate to learn about this topic. Through the involvement of an industry expert as a Co-PI the workshop content will be further strengthened. A website will be developed for this workshop to include the specific details on the workshop activities. It will be used to act as a clearing house for all relevant research and literature related to building sustainable infrastructure in developing countries. Results will be published in appropriate journals, newsletters, and websites. The case study project data will be provided on the workshop website and participants will be encouraged to use it as a training and educational resource. This award was co-funded by the Office of International Science and Engineering.