Specialized Methods in the Research of Mega Infrastructure Construction Management

It has been previously emphasized that mega infrastructure construction management involves many fields, including politics, the economy, society, technology, and human disciplines, and that no management that masters the overall complexity of the management problems can emerge without the integration of the natural sciences, social sciences, and human disciplines. This fact suggests that different types of methods are demanded for solving management problems in mega infrastructure construction. Thus, the exploration and introduction of new methods directed by theoretical methodology of mega infrastructure construction management are required. Accordingly, four points must be emphasized: 1. Regarding the management problems of mega infrastructure construction, there is a group of problems concerned with engineering technology and natural laws that can be solved by quantitative methods that are widely used in other fields. However, people may also create and implement new quantitative methods in mega infrastructure construction management, but these methods are usually regarded as improvements of existing mature methods rather than new methods. In other words, in the theoretical research of mega infrastructure construction management, there are few completely new and unique quantitative systems. Therefore, there is no need to provide a list of these mature quantitative methods. 2. There are many qualitative methods in the theoretical field of mega infrastructure construction that are identical to those used in social science research. However, because the management problems of mega infrastructure construction have unique properties, there must be a class of new methods other than the ordinary quantitative methods that demonstrate this feature. Hence, the panoramic qualitative analysis is introduced. 3. In recent years, the information and computer technology field gains increasingly more weight in the research of mega infrastructure construction management. For example, technologies such as computer simulations and computational experiments provide new means for the managerial activities to reconstruct and discover scenarios. In particular, it provides new methods to characterize and describe the complex wholeness of management problems, which cannot be achieved using the traditional quantitative and qualitative methods. Therefore, scenarios farming is selected as a new typical method to illustrate. 4. Models must be built that represent the entirety of the managerial activities in mega infrastructure construction. The models must be of various complexities, and they must conceptualize, to some degree, the active entity and refine the essential property of the active entity at a theoretical level. This is the process of mega infrastructure construction management modeling. Based on the integration of current advanced modeling thinking, especially that based on information technology, and on the reflection of the complex wholeness of mega infrastructure construction, the new method of federation modeling is introduced.