Dina Atef Saad

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Cairo University

Mass production manufacturing concept is commonly used in real estate developments by constructing multiple phases or buildings concurrently to save time and cost. As a result, real estate developers usually sell a large percentage of the project before construction in order to secure funding to finance the mass construction work. However, it has b...

Real estate and the housing market is one of the main drivers of the economy and national prosperity. It contributes significantly to a nation’s GDP due to the numerous property-related activities associated with it, including construction, facility management, investments, etc. Real estate sector performance is greatly impacted by several dynamic...

Several techniques were developed to improve resource allocation in construction projects, yet few in repetitive construction projects. Accordingly, this research aims at minimizing resource consumption and fluctuations using Line-of-Balance (LOB) repetitive scheduling technique. An optimization model has been developed consisting of three modules:...

Egypt is one of the richest countries in its historic and tourism attractions which are among the main contributors to the country's gross domestic product (GDP). Historic Cairo which has hundreds of mesmerizing historic Coptic and Islamic structures (mosques, churches, mausoleums, etc.) has been identified by UNESCO as a world heritage site since...

Repetitive scheduling (RS) using conventional methods suffers from many drawbacks due to forced resource continuity assumptions that increase time and cost. Moreover, it leads to an increased work-in-progress (WIP) inventory of units as a result of the unit's idle time between successive activities. Interruption-based RS techniques were introduced...

The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) rapid spread across the world has unfortunately led to huge number of fatalities and large number of cases overflowing the capacity of health care facilities (HCF) causing a global public health issue. This health crisis has gotten worse with the new corona virus variant, which transmits even faster leading t...

The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) rapid spread across the world has unfortunately led to huge number of fatalities and large number of cases overflowing the capacity of health care facilities (HCF) causing a global public health issue. This health crisis has gotten worse with the new corona virus variant, which transmits even faster leading t...

Design changes (DC) contribute significantly to construction projects’ delays and cost overruns. Many research efforts tackled DCs management, yet with less efforts in healthcare construction (HC) projects which involve multiple stakeholders including medical users and require meeting engineering and medical specifications. Therefore, a new system...

Egypt is famous for its cultural heritage and historic attractions that span thousands of years. This cultural heritage is one of the tourism industry motors which contributes significantly to the country's gross domestic product (GDP). Historic Cairo has been declared as a UNESCO World Heritage Site for having hundreds of mesmerizing historic Isla...

The residential real estate market in Egypt has witnessed significant growth to meet the increasing demand for housing units. Accordingly, many residential communities have been developed. The performance and the quality of the provided housing facilities in most of these communities, however, have rapidly deteriorated. This is due to insufficiency...

Infrastructure fund-allocation is a complex multi-dimensional decision-making problem. It involves multiple stakeholders, thousands of assets with multiple alternative renewal types and timings for each intervention over the planning horizon. Decision-makers need to satisfy stakeholders’ preferences, and determine which and when assets will be fund...

Construction of low-income housing is a tremendous challenge for governments to meet the increasing demand especially in developing countries. A fast and cost-effective construction process, therefore, is needed. To meet these requirements, light cold-formed steel (CFS) framing systems have been used as an alternative to traditional systems. Low-in...

Managing the rehabilitation of co-located infrastructure assets (pavements, pipelines, culverts, etc.) has become a major challenge for municipalities due to the varying rehabilitation requirements of these assets and the need for better coordination of rehabilitation works. Yet, most of the existing fund-allocation methods are not structured to ad...

Roads, water/sewer pipes, bridges, and culverts are usually co-located in the same corridor, accordingly, managing the rehabilitation of these assets requires better coordination to reduce the social costs associated with multiple disruptions for the same corridor. Yet, most of the existing municipal rehabilitation plans deal with co-located assets...

Infrastructure modernization has been taking over headlines for decades, yet there is still a huge backlog of overdue rehabilitation projects across the world due to limited available funds and rapid infrastructure deterioration. Allocating funds to infrastructure rehabilitation, however, is a challenging decision making problem. Decision makers ar...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to propose a microeconomic-based approach to support fund-allocation decisions for a large number of assets. Under the prevailing financial constraints and rapid deterioration of facilities, arriving at optimum fund allocation for capital renewal projects has become very challenging. Due to the complexity of m...

Benefit–cost analysis (BCA) is a common approach used by public agencies to decide among a set of alternative investments. Such analysis, however, is not structured to handle complex problems with multi-level decisions, such as distributing a limited rehabilitation fund among a large number of infrastructure assets, considering alternative rehabili...

Behavioral economics is a newly emerging field that examines the impact of psychological factors such as attitudes, biases, and behaviors on decision makers’ choices. Because many decisions in engineering and management involve subjective experience-based assessments of situations (e.g., bidding and fund-allocation), the psychological factors playi...

Infrastructure rehabilitation has been a tremendous challenge for municipalities and public agencies. Although several methods exist to allocate a limited rehabilitation budget among a large number of competing assets, no efforts provide solid economic reasoning or justification behind fund-allocation decisions. Thus, this paper introduces a new pe...

Allocating limited capital-renewal (rehabilitation) funds among a large number of competing infrastructure assets has been a tremendous challenge for municipalities and public agencies. However, in the literature, there have been only limited efforts to provide economic approaches that can optimize, test, and justify fund-allocation decisions. In a...

Purpose – This paper aims at improving progress tracking and control of repetitive projects by developing a novel framework that automates the documentation of as-built information directly into the project schedule and also introduces enhanced linear scheduling formulation to support project control decisions. Design/methodology/approach – The pr...

Behavioral economics is a newly emerging field that tries to examine the impact of psychological factors such as attitudes, biases, and behaviors on decision makers’ choices. Because many decisions in construction involve subjective experience-based assessments of situations (e.g., bidding, fund-allocation, etc.), the psychological factors playing...

This paper presents a hands-on exercise on construction project management to augment traditional teaching methods and help students improve their construction experience and project management skills. The exercise involved 100 students participating in managing and constructing a 3.8-m (12.5-ft) model of Canada's CN Tower within a 30-min deadline....

Municipalities and public agencies are currently facing tremendous pressures to sustain the safety and operability of their deteriorating infrastructure assets while being able to justify the associated expenditures. Infrastructure asset management involves detailed life cycle cost analysis (LCCA) to optimally allocate limited rehabilitation (renew...

Complete and timely progress information is essential for assessing project performance, deciding corrective actions, and documenting as-built details. Collection of progress information, however, has been a manual process that is time-consuming and errors-prone. This paper proposes an automated framework for site information tracking and communica...

Wind turbine construction is a challenging undertaking due to the need to lift heavy loads to high locations in conditions of high and variable wind speeds. These conditions create great risks to contractors during the turbine assembly process. This paper presents a simulation-based system to aid in the construction planning of wind turbines. The s...