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Partnering is the master key element for project quality. It opens the doors to commitment and communication between the parties and provides the mastic which turns disparate groups with varying aims into a coherent team with common objectives (Baden-Hellard).There has been considerable business emphasis placed upon the development of collaborative relationships across companies in recent years. Construction is no exception. The presence of trust in the relationships has been cited as central to successful business and project outcomes (Partnership Sourcing Ltd. 1994, Latham1994). Trust is central to the development of non- adversarial business relationships, and hence provides fertile ground for the development of practices such as partnering, strategic alliances and supply chain management.The paper focuses upon the partnering concept in construction and discusses the role of trust as a key dimension for reducing adversarial relations in project working environments.

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Determination of allowable free span length plays a crucial role in design of offshore pipelines. The seabed intervention cost and safety of an offshore pipelines project are largely influenced by pipelines free spanning during the project life time. Different criteria are proposed by both the current designing guidelines and researchers there is however lack of comprehensive assessment of independent parameters affects the design length of free span. In this note, it is intended to investigate the effects of seabed formation along with axial force on Natural Frequency of offshore pipelines. Based on this assessment a new simple formula is proposed. Finally, to evaluate the result of this study, the allowable free span length of Qeshem Island pipelines is calculated as a case study and compared with those of the DNV (1998) and ABS (2001) guidelines and the modal analysis.

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Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (RCPSP) is one of the most popular problems in the scheduling phase of any project. This paper tackles the RCPSP in which activity durations can vary within their certain ranges such as RCPSP with variable activity durations. In this paper, we have attempted to find the most suitable hybridization of GA variants to solve the mentioned problem. For this reason, three GA variants (Standard GA, Stud GA and Jumping Gene) were utilized for first GA, and two GA variants (Standard GA, Stud GA) for the second one, and their hybridizations were compared. For this purpose, several comparisons of the following hybridizations of GAs are performed: Standard-Standard GA, Standard-Stud GA, Stud-Standard GA, Stud-Stud GA, Jumping Gene-Standard GA, and Jumping Gene-Stud GA. Simulation results show that implementing Stud-Stud GA hybridization to solve this problem will cause convergence on the minimum project makespan, faster and more accurate than other hybrids. The robustness of the Stud GA in solving the well-known benchmarking RCPSP problems with deterministic activity durations is also analyzed.

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Resource allocation project scheduling problem (RCPSP) has been one of the challenging subjects amongst researchers in the last decades. Most of the researches in this scope have used deterministic variables, however in a real project activities are exposed to risks and uncertainties that cause to delay in project’s duration. There are some researchers that have considered the risks for scheduling, however, new metahuristics are available to solve this problem for finding better solution with less computational time. In this paper, two new metahuristic algorithms are applied for solving fuzzy resource allocation project scheduling problem (FRCPSP) known as charged system search (CSS) and colliding body optimization (CBO). The results show that both of these algorithms find reasonable solutions, however CBO finds the results in a less computational time having a better quality. A case study is conducted to evaluate the performance and applicability of the proposed algorithms.