Orozco Francisco

Universidad Panamericana · Graduate Programs in Engineering

Globalization and the highly competitive environment have led to an urgent need to create effective competitive strategies in order to survive. Therefore, companies require a better understanding about the interrelationships between the factors that determine competitiveness and indexes to measure it. Considering that strategic planning within the...

Globalization and industry competitiveness has led to an urgent need for an effective competitiveness management strategy. This, companies require a better understanding about the definition of competitiveness, factors for determining it, and indexes for measuring it. This paper provides the results of an exhaustive literature review about competit...

Simulations and classroom games are effective hands-on learning tools for construction students and practitioners. This paper presents the background, methods and results of a new management game which simulates some aspects of the Last Planner System (LPS™) and lean production. LPS is central to the implementation of Lean Construction, an increasi...

Variability is a major problem in construction projects. It can negatively affect performance and disrupt production. In the past two decades, a considerable amount of research has been undertaken to select a suitable statistical model that can accurately model this variability. Although the beta distribution has achieved extensive acceptance to mo...

Activity delays are a common issue in the construction industry and can increase project schedules and costs. Recent research efforts have focused on the quantitative evaluation of delay impacts. The literature suggests that the construction industry is in need of additional research to systematically relate the causes of delays to their impacts. T...

The construction industry is continuously affected by external and internal agents that modify and define its competitiveness. Changing markets, currency fluctuations, and tremendous competition have made the issue of competitiveness increasingly important. The literature highlights factors that determine the competitiveness of construction firms,...

Contribution: To guide engineering educators on the complex path of understanding how to teach future engineers and how they can help engineering students to obtain the professional competencies required by frameworks and syllabus, based on didactic techniques that determine an orderly learning process. Background: University education is committ...

Historically, the construction industry has exhibited slow technological development when compared to other industries. However, during the last several years, investigations related to automation in construction have been conducted, such as additive manufacturing in concrete. This study aims to delve into this topic, providing effective communicat...

In the face of the high variability in the completion of construction projects, the following research is generated. In the literature we can find several proposals to program projects, however, the variability of the activities causes high variability in the completion date of the projects. We hope that the proposed method, by controlling the star...

Historically, the construction industry has presented high accident rates, and in order to get a deeper understanding and making right decisions, it is interesting to consider the risks from a worker’s point of view. This research addresses the perception of risks by construction workers from a psychometric paradigm and considering some sociodemogr...

The use of buffers as a production strategy entails establishing a balance between theory and practice. In the complex environment of construction projects, this balance establishment requires an optimization process. It involves multiple criteria necessary to project success. So far, the heuristics and analytics developed, either fail to provide a...

Natural disasters affect the construction industry in many ways other than the direct damages. This paper presents a model that evaluates the performance impacts caused by an earthquake to the construction industry by using the 2010 Chilean earthquake as case study. The main variables affected by a seismic event in construction companies and their...

The Human Development Index HDI is a summarized quantification of human development of nations, based on three dimensions: income, education and health, classifying countries differently to the Gross National Income GNI index classification. However, for the construction industry, the authors found no plausible evidence of exhaustive studies in thi...

Buffers are used to deal with the detrimental impacts of uncertainty on projects. However, methods for the allocation of buffers often provide single unique solutions, which are inefficient in the multiobjective decision-making environment of construction. This paper discusses a probabilistic-based buffer allocation method (PBAL), which enables the...

We present an application of the European Customer Satisfaction Index to the Mexican Restaurant Industry. We model the Index using Partial Least Squares Path Modeling. We will present the literature review that supports the construction of the manifest variables that serve as a proxy for the latent variables of the model. We also give an economic b...

Natural disasters such as earthquakes and tsunamis foster the creation of effective evacuation strategies to prevent the loss of human lives. This article proposes a simulation model to find out optimum evacuation routes, during a tsunami using Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithms. ACO is a discrete optimization algorithm inspired by the abilit...

The first author's name was erroneously published as '"M. Posbdarsup". The paper has been republished with the correct author byline on both the PDF and online HTML version.

The last Chilean earthquake, occurred on February 27, 2010, allowed establishing important patterns of structural failures in reinforced concrete residential buildings; however, limited progress has been made in the study of basic standards of serviceability, such as obstruction of doors. Thus, this study focused on measuring the influence of desig...

La globalizacio´n y el ambiente altamente competitivo han generado una urgente necesidad por crear estrategias competitivas para sobrevivir. Por ello, las compañías requieren un mejor entendimiento sobre co´mo interrelacionan los factores que determinan la competitividad y los índices que la miden. Considerando que la planificacio´n estratégica den...

La globalización y el ambiente altamente competitivo han generado una urgente necesidad por crear estrategias competitivas para sobrevivir. Por ello, las compañías requieren un mejor entendimiento sobre cómo interrelacionan los factores que determinan la competitividad y los índices que la miden. Considerando que la planificación estratégica dentro...

Uncertainty is an inherent part of production systems. In construction processes, production variability emerges as one of the most typical representation of uncertainty. Negative variability impacts in construction demands effective solutions to mitigate its effects on the accomplishment of projects. The incorporation of buffers constitutes powerf...