Courses | VD Academic Affairs

Business and management aspects of construction: Kuwait industry profile, company organization, contracting methods, bonding and insurance, subcontracts, cash flow, and markup.

Procedures for deciding under uncertainty. Fundamentals of the expected-utility rule with personal subjective probabilities. Current applications of decision analysis. Analysis of problems using decision trees that include risk and time preference. Determination of the economic value of perfect and imperfect information on one or several variables in a decision problem.

Database management systems. Objective-oriented programming. Expert systems and artificial intelligence. Decision support systems.

Seminar dealing with the problems of building construction. Subjects include search patterns and sortation, standard specifications and control, systems safety, insurance and risk management, materials and workmanship, R&D activities, technological adaptation, development of indigenous capabilities and requirements of the construction industry.

Systematic approach to control the quality and performance of engineering projects while maintaining minimum costs. Real projects are studied by multi-disciplinary groups working in teams to specify the real value of the project.

Contract planning, construction procurement and contract negotiations, contract formation and agreement, contract administration and management. Change orders administration, types of claims and disputes, claims analysis, evaluation and resolution. Alternative dispute resolution (ADR), Litigation and arbitration.

Introduction to soil dynamics, review of linear vibration theory, earthquake engineering, dynamic soil properties, response analysis and response spectra, liquefaction, settlement, foundation design for vibratory loads, isolation of foundation.

Behavior and properties of rock as an engineering material, rock exploration, stress analysis in rocks, failure of rocks, design and construction of underground structures and slopes in rock, design of rock abutments for dams, engineering applications, laboratory and field rock testing techniques.

Shear strength of granular and cohesive soils, failure criteria in soils, lab/field tests selections, types of slopes failure, methods of analysis, slope stability of dams and embankments, infinite slope analysis, finite slope analysis, computer applications.

The application of geotechnical engineering principles and methods to site selection and design of municipal solid waste landfills that include settlement analysis, slope stability, liner compaction, and leachate collection system, as they relate to designing a landfill. Computer software is used to assist in the design scenarios.

Consolidation theory and secondary compression. Settlement Analysis. Basic strength principles. Stress-strain-strength behavior of clays with emphasis on effects of sample disturbance, anisotropy and strain rate. Stress-strain-strength behavior of granular soils. Engineering properties of compacted soils. Laboratory on consolidation and strength testing.

Geotechnical properties of local soils (subsurface desert sand, cemented sand, coastal ground). Soil compaction. Subsurface water rise: causes and remedial measures. Slurry trench cutoffs. Soil grouting. Subsurface drainage of cohesive soils. Soil reinforcement. Preloading. Instrumentations. Case studies.

Stress at a point. Strain at a point. Stress-strain relationships in linearly elastic materials. Basic equations of elasticity in solids. Critical state concepts. Plasticity . Basic formulation of viscoelastic materials. Viscoplasticity. Constitutive equations. Applications.

The urban system, urban activities and transport system, spatial interaction modelling, optimization models, econometric models, demographic models, intergrated urban systems modeling and policy analysis.

Public transportation system technologies, urban passenger transport modes, bus system, paratransit, planning public transportation systems, rural public transportation, comparing transit modes, management and operations of public transit systems, public transportation security and safety, environmental impacts of transit systems.