Missouri S&T professor’s work honored by American Society of Civil Engineers

The American Society of Civil Engineers has recognized Dr. Islam El-adaway, the Hurst/McCarthy Professor at Missouri University of Science and Technology, and his team with the 2020 Thomas Fitch Rowland Prize for significant contributions to construction engineering.

El-adaway won the prize for the paper “First Attempt Toward a Holistic Understanding of the Interdependent Rippled Impacts Associated with Out-of-Sequence Work in Construction Projects: System Dynamics Modeling Approach.” The paper was published in the September 2018 issue of Journal of Construction Engineering and Management.

“According to our research, there are 25 factors that can go out of sequence, causing productivity losses, cost and schedule overruns, and quality decline, either directly or indirectly,” says El-adaway. “This paper models many of the interrelated factors for the first time, and our end goal is to model all 25.”

One such factor could be a change order, El-adaway says. Or perhaps construction has been completed, but the quality is subpar and the builders need to bring on a different work crew or use different materials, he says. The model developed by El-adaway and his team enables users to examine projects both retrospectively and prospectively. For instance, they can review a completed project and determine what went wrong and when. Or they could use the model to predict what could happen if one or more factors on a current or future project goes out of sequence.

El-adaway collaborated on the paper with lead author Dr. Ibrahim Abotaleb, an assistant professor of construction engineering at the American University in Cairo. Abotaleb is El-adaway’s former student and performed post-doctoral research at Missouri S&T. El-adaway received the award on March 8, 2020, during the Construction Research Congress in Tempe, Ariz. The prize recognizes papers in which the authors describe accomplished works of construction or make valuable contributions to construction management and construction engineering.

El-adaway’s research group earlier received the 2017 ASCE award for best peer-reviewed paper from the Journal of Construction Engineering and Management.