Quan T. Nguyen (The-Quan Nguyen) is an Associate Professor in Faculty of Construction Economics and Management, National University of Civil Engineering (NUCE), Hanoi. Graduated in the University of Leeds in 2009, he is now lecturing, providing consultancy services in construction management, as well as doing research in sustainable construction, affordable housing, BIM and integrated project delivery. He is currently directing the Institute of Investment and Construction Management, a technology transfer centre established by NUCE, where he founded the NUCE BIM Centre in 2017. He is also an active member of the supporting expert team for the BIM Steering Committee in Vietnam
International Journal of Sustainable Construction Engineering and Technology
Building Information Modelling (BIM) has been proven as an innovative approach to bring values to... more Building Information Modelling (BIM) has been proven as an innovative approach to bring values to construction projectsas well as stakeholders, including construction consultancy firms. BIM adoption could assist construction consultancy Small and Medium-sized Enterprise (SMEs) inenhancingtheir competitive capability. Using a case study with a pioneer BIM service providers whichis an SMEin Vietnam(the Consultant), the paper explores the core competences for deliveringBIM services in relation with potential competitive advantages. Fourtypical BIM market segments have been discovered, which include:i) BIM strategic services, (ii) BIM services, (iii) BIM-enabled services, and (iv) BIM tools development. Exploring six BIM cases, the realizedcore competences of the Consultant which are reported in the paper includethe BIM-related skillful human resources (both in-house and from external), BIM know-hows, reputation, and also the benefits from a BIM network that the Consultant established a...
IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering, 2022
The paper presents the life cycle energy analysis (LCEA) of an office green building in Hanoi, Vi... more The paper presents the life cycle energy analysis (LCEA) of an office green building in Hanoi, Vietnam to prove the advantages of green buildings regarding energy efficiency and environmental effects. The case study building is a concrete structured one, which consists of 3 basements, 17 floors, and 1 attic with a gross area of 14,112 m2. In the study, the building’s embodied energy is determined based on the contained energy coefficient of the ith material and its quantity needed. Whereas, the operating energy is computed according to the annual energy consumption of the building, which is stimulated by the EnergyPlus simulation software. Relying on the relative share of the demolition energy with the life cycle energy that has been proposed by previous publications, this category will be estimated. Results showed that the initial embodied energy contributed the largest share to the life cycle energy (61.37%), followed by operational energy (27.61%). It also indicated that the perc...
The use of life-cycle costing in construction management is fruitful. There is an abundance of ta... more The use of life-cycle costing in construction management is fruitful. There is an abundance of tailored, casespecific methods of LCC being developed for use in different cases or industries. However, in public buildings in Vietnam, due to the unavailability of cost, norm data and official guidance, no case of LCC use has been discovered in practice. The paper proposes an adapted approach for LCC in which life-cycle cost can be calculated as a sum of three major elements: initial construction costs, operation and maintenance costs, and the deconstruction costs. For illustration, the paper introduces a case study in calculating life-cycle cost for the Vietnam Securities Depository Centre, the first public office building being accredited as a green building under LOTUS scheme in the country. Using the same process, life-cycle costs can be calculated for other design alternatives for the building. The results are then compared to support the decision-making process to get the most viab...
International Journal of Sustainable Construction Engineering and Technology
A number of educational buildings were built up by the Frenchin Hanoi during their dominance. Mos... more A number of educational buildings were built up by the Frenchin Hanoi during their dominance. Most of these buildings still exist in the downtown area and have become an integral part of the valuable heritage, and their preservation is increasingly imperative. To preserve and promote more efficiently the values of the colonial buildingheritage assets, there is a need of a set of criteria for an assessment and classification. This paper presents the development ofan assessment criteria system for the architectural heritage of colonial educational buildings in Hanoi. According to the proposals, colonial educational buildings can be classified into three groupsof Special Value, Notable Value, Average Value. A set of criteria including factors related to both the internal and external values of these buildings have been proposed and validated with expert judgements. Each criterion then is incorporated witha set of scores showing the value it can bring to a colonial educational building ...
International Journal of Building Pathology and Adaptation, 2022
PurposeThis paper aims to provide an integrated BIM-based approach for quantity take-off for prog... more PurposeThis paper aims to provide an integrated BIM-based approach for quantity take-off for progress payments in the context of high-rise buildings in Vietnam. It tries to find answers for the following questions: (1)Â When to start the QTO processes to facilitate the contract progress payments? (2) What information is required to measure the quantity of works to estimate contract progress payment (3) What are the challenges to manage (i.e. create, store, update and exploit)? What are the required information for this BIM use? and (4) How to process the information to deliver BIM-based QTO to facilitate contract progress payment?Design/methodology/approachThe paper applied a deductive approach and expert consensus through a Delphi procedure to adapt to current innovation around BIM-based QTO. Starting with a literature review, it then discusses current practices in BIM-based QTO in general and high-rise building projects in particular. Challenges were compiled from the previous stud...
Journal of Engineering, Design and Technology, 2021
Purpose This paper aims to Test the capabilities/accuracies of four deep learning pre trained con... more Purpose This paper aims to Test the capabilities/accuracies of four deep learning pre trained convolutional neural network (CNN) models to detect and classify types of highway cracks, as well as developing a new CNN model to maximize the accuracy at different learning rates. Design/methodology/approach A sample of 4,663 images of highway cracks were collected and classified into three categories of cracks, namely, “vertical cracks,” “horizontal and vertical cracks” and “diagonal cracks,” subsequently, using “Matlab” to classify the sample to training (70%) and testing (30%) to apply the four deep learning CNN models and compute their accuracies. After that, developing a new deep learning CNN model to maximize the accuracy of detecting and classifying highway cracks and testing the accuracy using three optimization algorithms at different learning rates. Findings The accuracies result of the four deep learning pre-trained models are above the averages between top-1 and top-5 and the ...
International Journal of Sustainable Construction Engineering and Technology, 2021
Building Information Modelling (BIM), an emerging trend in the construction industry worldwide, h... more Building Information Modelling (BIM), an emerging trend in the construction industry worldwide, has been officially introduced to Vietnam recently in some piloted projects. However, in Vietnam, the BIM market is still immature due to that the players in the construction industry have perceived many barriers in adopting this new solution. In a country with a civil law system like Vietnam, the legal environment is considered as the most important enabler for the construction industry to adopt innovative technologies, including BIM. This paper, using a hybrid research approach of surveys and expert judgment, discusses the most popular barriers in BIM adoption in the construction industry in Vietnam, which include five internal and five external barriers. The country’s BIM roadmap, policies and relevant legal documents that are currently in effective are then collected and analyzed in line with the discovered barriers in order to explore their effectiveness in creating an enabling envir...
IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering, 2020
The paper presents research results from 90 BIM jobs vacancies for the AEC industry in Vietnam wh... more The paper presents research results from 90 BIM jobs vacancies for the AEC industry in Vietnam which were advertised on popular recruitment channels. The results show that BIM jobs in the South are more popular than in the North and the Central. BIM-related job positions are different from company to company, but this study groups those positions into three basic positions according to the international best practice approach: BIM Manager, BIM Coordinator, BIM Modeler. For BIM Modelers, their main job is to develop 3D models, deploy design documents, and coordinate with stakeholders to perform the work. BIM Coordinator’s on-demand job is to coordinate models across disciplines, check conflict and report, control models, support project management. The main task of a BIM Manager is to manage and develop BIM uses, to ensure the information to be communicated among the parties in the projects, and train BIM human resources in the company. There are many requirements for these positions...
Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, 2018
This paper explores the impact of different distance metrics on collinearity in local regression ... more This paper explores the impact of different distance metrics on collinearity in local regression models such as geographically weighted regression. Using a case study of house price data collected in Hà Nội, Vietnam, and by fully varying both power and rotation parameters to create different Minkowski distances, the analysis shows that local collinearity can be both negatively and positively affected by distance metric choice. The Minkowski distance that maximised collinearity in a geographically weighted regression was approximate to a Manhattan distance with (power =  0.70) with a rotation of 30°, and that which minimised collinearity was parameterised with power  = 0.05 and a rotation of 70°. The results indicate that distance metric choice can provide a useful extra tuning component to address local collinearity issues in spatially varying coefficient modelling and that understanding the interaction of distance metric and collinearity can provide insight into the nature and stru...
Sustainable urbanization requires that all forms of development and associated policies be judged... more Sustainable urbanization requires that all forms of development and associated policies be judged on the basis of three criteria: economy, ecology and equity. Therefore, together with developing economic infrastructure supporting economic activities, cities need to provide socialinfrastructure assets for accommodating social services to securea better living quality for urban inhabitants. This paper looks into the practices of safety and security in student rentals in Hanoi, using data collected from a survey with participants as students from universities and colleges in the city. The paper investigates the issues in student rentals in order to find out significant influential factors affecting safety and security in this rental market under the tenants’ perspective as well as important criteria to their accommodation choice. According to the survey results, the survey participants have experienced thirteen factors causing their safety and security risks in rental accommodation, wh...
Construction waste accounts for a large amount of waste in urban areas all over the world as well... more Construction waste accounts for a large amount of waste in urban areas all over the world as well as in Vietnam. Aiming to find out more proper solutions for managing this type of waste, this paper looks into the practice of construction waste management in urban construction project in Vietnam. Using both secondary data available in published materials and primary data from a survey with 56 respondents as construction practitioners, this paper points out the application of six popular approaches in waste management in urban construction projects in Vietnam: disposal, process, recycle, reuse, reduce and prevent in different level of popularity. It also reviews relevant regulations and laws for construction waste management in Vietnam as supporting factor for promoting modern methods for construction waste management. The roles of different stakeholders in urban construction projects such as owners, contractors and construction management etc. are also investigated in terms or their ...
ABSTRACT Hundreds of construction state-owned small and medium sized construction enterprises in ... more ABSTRACT Hundreds of construction state-owned small and medium sized construction enterprises in Vietnam have been equitized to date. They have faced many postequitization problems. However, researchers have focused mainly on the equitization process, with limited research having been done on the post equitization period. A survey of 25 newly equitized construction SMEs using a qualitative triangulated research approach has been undertaken to address this gap. Five significant problems have emerged from the survey, which include both internal issues and problems created by external factors. Among the solutions that firms have applied, the enticement of a strategic investor may be considered as an appropriate option to sort out the internal problems. Also, firms should not stay passive and wait for the environment to change in their favour. Firms need to decide which solution(s) to apply as well as get involved in the process of making their business environment clear, clean and fair for their own benefits.
ABSTRACT Reusing material is a measure for resource-saving which is considered important in susta... more ABSTRACT Reusing material is a measure for resource-saving which is considered important in sustainable development as well as in sustainable construction management worldwide. This approach leads to the reduction in the amount of construction waste, energy and raw materials, and then contributes to sustainable construction as well as sustainable development. In Vietnam, in history, re-using demolition materials in new houses was already applied by Vietnamese people long time ago when they built their own homes in order to reduce cost, but the practice was spontaneous and has not been considered widely as important. Aiming to explore the current practice of re-using construction materials in the construction industry in Vietnam, a survey has been conducted with respondents from academic institutions and the industry. The paper points out that this practice can be found in a variety of types of construction projects, but is most popular with private houses. The materials to be commonly reused are limited to materials such as steel and metal, brick and aggregate and wooden materials. The rate of using those materials is relatively low in projects, mostly below 10%. The paper then presents three groups of solutions for promoting and developing this practice to a wider application. It is believed that the local and governmental authorities need to act first, then other stakeholders in construction will follow.
IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering
Vietnam has been shifting from a centrally planned economy with subsidy schemes, to a socialist-o... more Vietnam has been shifting from a centrally planned economy with subsidy schemes, to a socialist-oriented market economy with multiple economic components. The internal dynamics and external pressures have caused many changes in the environment for small and medium size construction enterprises. This research models the external environment in order to aid understanding of the strategic management of such contractors in the construction industry of Vietnam. Semi-structured interviews of senior managers were combined with a mailed questionnaire to collect data. Seven major concepts were found to emerge including the economic administration of the country, the legacy of the old system, changes in society, nature of the workforce and the variety of business styles found. The research results show that the behaviour of key stakeholders has a major impact on the strategic/competitive behaviour of the concerned firms and their profitability.
International Journal of Sustainable Construction Engineering and Technology
Building Information Modelling (BIM) has been proven as an innovative approach to bring values to... more Building Information Modelling (BIM) has been proven as an innovative approach to bring values to construction projectsas well as stakeholders, including construction consultancy firms. BIM adoption could assist construction consultancy Small and Medium-sized Enterprise (SMEs) inenhancingtheir competitive capability. Using a case study with a pioneer BIM service providers whichis an SMEin Vietnam(the Consultant), the paper explores the core competences for deliveringBIM services in relation with potential competitive advantages. Fourtypical BIM market segments have been discovered, which include:i) BIM strategic services, (ii) BIM services, (iii) BIM-enabled services, and (iv) BIM tools development. Exploring six BIM cases, the realizedcore competences of the Consultant which are reported in the paper includethe BIM-related skillful human resources (both in-house and from external), BIM know-hows, reputation, and also the benefits from a BIM network that the Consultant established a...
IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering, 2022
The paper presents the life cycle energy analysis (LCEA) of an office green building in Hanoi, Vi... more The paper presents the life cycle energy analysis (LCEA) of an office green building in Hanoi, Vietnam to prove the advantages of green buildings regarding energy efficiency and environmental effects. The case study building is a concrete structured one, which consists of 3 basements, 17 floors, and 1 attic with a gross area of 14,112 m2. In the study, the building’s embodied energy is determined based on the contained energy coefficient of the ith material and its quantity needed. Whereas, the operating energy is computed according to the annual energy consumption of the building, which is stimulated by the EnergyPlus simulation software. Relying on the relative share of the demolition energy with the life cycle energy that has been proposed by previous publications, this category will be estimated. Results showed that the initial embodied energy contributed the largest share to the life cycle energy (61.37%), followed by operational energy (27.61%). It also indicated that the perc...
The use of life-cycle costing in construction management is fruitful. There is an abundance of ta... more The use of life-cycle costing in construction management is fruitful. There is an abundance of tailored, casespecific methods of LCC being developed for use in different cases or industries. However, in public buildings in Vietnam, due to the unavailability of cost, norm data and official guidance, no case of LCC use has been discovered in practice. The paper proposes an adapted approach for LCC in which life-cycle cost can be calculated as a sum of three major elements: initial construction costs, operation and maintenance costs, and the deconstruction costs. For illustration, the paper introduces a case study in calculating life-cycle cost for the Vietnam Securities Depository Centre, the first public office building being accredited as a green building under LOTUS scheme in the country. Using the same process, life-cycle costs can be calculated for other design alternatives for the building. The results are then compared to support the decision-making process to get the most viab...
International Journal of Sustainable Construction Engineering and Technology
A number of educational buildings were built up by the Frenchin Hanoi during their dominance. Mos... more A number of educational buildings were built up by the Frenchin Hanoi during their dominance. Most of these buildings still exist in the downtown area and have become an integral part of the valuable heritage, and their preservation is increasingly imperative. To preserve and promote more efficiently the values of the colonial buildingheritage assets, there is a need of a set of criteria for an assessment and classification. This paper presents the development ofan assessment criteria system for the architectural heritage of colonial educational buildings in Hanoi. According to the proposals, colonial educational buildings can be classified into three groupsof Special Value, Notable Value, Average Value. A set of criteria including factors related to both the internal and external values of these buildings have been proposed and validated with expert judgements. Each criterion then is incorporated witha set of scores showing the value it can bring to a colonial educational building ...
International Journal of Building Pathology and Adaptation, 2022
PurposeThis paper aims to provide an integrated BIM-based approach for quantity take-off for prog... more PurposeThis paper aims to provide an integrated BIM-based approach for quantity take-off for progress payments in the context of high-rise buildings in Vietnam. It tries to find answers for the following questions: (1)Â When to start the QTO processes to facilitate the contract progress payments? (2) What information is required to measure the quantity of works to estimate contract progress payment (3) What are the challenges to manage (i.e. create, store, update and exploit)? What are the required information for this BIM use? and (4) How to process the information to deliver BIM-based QTO to facilitate contract progress payment?Design/methodology/approachThe paper applied a deductive approach and expert consensus through a Delphi procedure to adapt to current innovation around BIM-based QTO. Starting with a literature review, it then discusses current practices in BIM-based QTO in general and high-rise building projects in particular. Challenges were compiled from the previous stud...
Journal of Engineering, Design and Technology, 2021
Purpose This paper aims to Test the capabilities/accuracies of four deep learning pre trained con... more Purpose This paper aims to Test the capabilities/accuracies of four deep learning pre trained convolutional neural network (CNN) models to detect and classify types of highway cracks, as well as developing a new CNN model to maximize the accuracy at different learning rates. Design/methodology/approach A sample of 4,663 images of highway cracks were collected and classified into three categories of cracks, namely, “vertical cracks,” “horizontal and vertical cracks” and “diagonal cracks,” subsequently, using “Matlab” to classify the sample to training (70%) and testing (30%) to apply the four deep learning CNN models and compute their accuracies. After that, developing a new deep learning CNN model to maximize the accuracy of detecting and classifying highway cracks and testing the accuracy using three optimization algorithms at different learning rates. Findings The accuracies result of the four deep learning pre-trained models are above the averages between top-1 and top-5 and the ...
International Journal of Sustainable Construction Engineering and Technology, 2021
Building Information Modelling (BIM), an emerging trend in the construction industry worldwide, h... more Building Information Modelling (BIM), an emerging trend in the construction industry worldwide, has been officially introduced to Vietnam recently in some piloted projects. However, in Vietnam, the BIM market is still immature due to that the players in the construction industry have perceived many barriers in adopting this new solution. In a country with a civil law system like Vietnam, the legal environment is considered as the most important enabler for the construction industry to adopt innovative technologies, including BIM. This paper, using a hybrid research approach of surveys and expert judgment, discusses the most popular barriers in BIM adoption in the construction industry in Vietnam, which include five internal and five external barriers. The country’s BIM roadmap, policies and relevant legal documents that are currently in effective are then collected and analyzed in line with the discovered barriers in order to explore their effectiveness in creating an enabling envir...
IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering, 2020
The paper presents research results from 90 BIM jobs vacancies for the AEC industry in Vietnam wh... more The paper presents research results from 90 BIM jobs vacancies for the AEC industry in Vietnam which were advertised on popular recruitment channels. The results show that BIM jobs in the South are more popular than in the North and the Central. BIM-related job positions are different from company to company, but this study groups those positions into three basic positions according to the international best practice approach: BIM Manager, BIM Coordinator, BIM Modeler. For BIM Modelers, their main job is to develop 3D models, deploy design documents, and coordinate with stakeholders to perform the work. BIM Coordinator’s on-demand job is to coordinate models across disciplines, check conflict and report, control models, support project management. The main task of a BIM Manager is to manage and develop BIM uses, to ensure the information to be communicated among the parties in the projects, and train BIM human resources in the company. There are many requirements for these positions...
Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, 2018
This paper explores the impact of different distance metrics on collinearity in local regression ... more This paper explores the impact of different distance metrics on collinearity in local regression models such as geographically weighted regression. Using a case study of house price data collected in Hà Nội, Vietnam, and by fully varying both power and rotation parameters to create different Minkowski distances, the analysis shows that local collinearity can be both negatively and positively affected by distance metric choice. The Minkowski distance that maximised collinearity in a geographically weighted regression was approximate to a Manhattan distance with (power =  0.70) with a rotation of 30°, and that which minimised collinearity was parameterised with power  = 0.05 and a rotation of 70°. The results indicate that distance metric choice can provide a useful extra tuning component to address local collinearity issues in spatially varying coefficient modelling and that understanding the interaction of distance metric and collinearity can provide insight into the nature and stru...
Sustainable urbanization requires that all forms of development and associated policies be judged... more Sustainable urbanization requires that all forms of development and associated policies be judged on the basis of three criteria: economy, ecology and equity. Therefore, together with developing economic infrastructure supporting economic activities, cities need to provide socialinfrastructure assets for accommodating social services to securea better living quality for urban inhabitants. This paper looks into the practices of safety and security in student rentals in Hanoi, using data collected from a survey with participants as students from universities and colleges in the city. The paper investigates the issues in student rentals in order to find out significant influential factors affecting safety and security in this rental market under the tenants’ perspective as well as important criteria to their accommodation choice. According to the survey results, the survey participants have experienced thirteen factors causing their safety and security risks in rental accommodation, wh...
Construction waste accounts for a large amount of waste in urban areas all over the world as well... more Construction waste accounts for a large amount of waste in urban areas all over the world as well as in Vietnam. Aiming to find out more proper solutions for managing this type of waste, this paper looks into the practice of construction waste management in urban construction project in Vietnam. Using both secondary data available in published materials and primary data from a survey with 56 respondents as construction practitioners, this paper points out the application of six popular approaches in waste management in urban construction projects in Vietnam: disposal, process, recycle, reuse, reduce and prevent in different level of popularity. It also reviews relevant regulations and laws for construction waste management in Vietnam as supporting factor for promoting modern methods for construction waste management. The roles of different stakeholders in urban construction projects such as owners, contractors and construction management etc. are also investigated in terms or their ...
ABSTRACT Hundreds of construction state-owned small and medium sized construction enterprises in ... more ABSTRACT Hundreds of construction state-owned small and medium sized construction enterprises in Vietnam have been equitized to date. They have faced many postequitization problems. However, researchers have focused mainly on the equitization process, with limited research having been done on the post equitization period. A survey of 25 newly equitized construction SMEs using a qualitative triangulated research approach has been undertaken to address this gap. Five significant problems have emerged from the survey, which include both internal issues and problems created by external factors. Among the solutions that firms have applied, the enticement of a strategic investor may be considered as an appropriate option to sort out the internal problems. Also, firms should not stay passive and wait for the environment to change in their favour. Firms need to decide which solution(s) to apply as well as get involved in the process of making their business environment clear, clean and fair for their own benefits.
ABSTRACT Reusing material is a measure for resource-saving which is considered important in susta... more ABSTRACT Reusing material is a measure for resource-saving which is considered important in sustainable development as well as in sustainable construction management worldwide. This approach leads to the reduction in the amount of construction waste, energy and raw materials, and then contributes to sustainable construction as well as sustainable development. In Vietnam, in history, re-using demolition materials in new houses was already applied by Vietnamese people long time ago when they built their own homes in order to reduce cost, but the practice was spontaneous and has not been considered widely as important. Aiming to explore the current practice of re-using construction materials in the construction industry in Vietnam, a survey has been conducted with respondents from academic institutions and the industry. The paper points out that this practice can be found in a variety of types of construction projects, but is most popular with private houses. The materials to be commonly reused are limited to materials such as steel and metal, brick and aggregate and wooden materials. The rate of using those materials is relatively low in projects, mostly below 10%. The paper then presents three groups of solutions for promoting and developing this practice to a wider application. It is believed that the local and governmental authorities need to act first, then other stakeholders in construction will follow.
IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering
Vietnam has been shifting from a centrally planned economy with subsidy schemes, to a socialist-o... more Vietnam has been shifting from a centrally planned economy with subsidy schemes, to a socialist-oriented market economy with multiple economic components. The internal dynamics and external pressures have caused many changes in the environment for small and medium size construction enterprises. This research models the external environment in order to aid understanding of the strategic management of such contractors in the construction industry of Vietnam. Semi-structured interviews of senior managers were combined with a mailed questionnaire to collect data. Seven major concepts were found to emerge including the economic administration of the country, the legacy of the old system, changes in society, nature of the workforce and the variety of business styles found. The research results show that the behaviour of key stakeholders has a major impact on the strategic/competitive behaviour of the concerned firms and their profitability.
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