Investigating the applicability of modular construction on highway structures in Kampala.

Abstract

In recent years, high urbanization rate has led to a numerous highway and bridge projects in the country. Although the projects are a good idea they always end up with high budget and overrun not to add delays on almost all of them. The purpose of this study is to investigate the applicability of modular construction on highway structure projects in Kampala. Five highway projects served as subjects in a study designed to investigate the topic.

Data for this research were obtained from these projects through observations and asking interview questions to the professionals in charge of running and managing these projects, with some additional data gathered from online sources and also online questionnaires were sent out to professionals regarding modular construction. This study was conducted in Kampala and all the empirical part of this study was conducted in April 2023. While gathering data for the empirical part of this research an interview was used how many of these highway projects have faced cost overruns and delays even with the use of modular construction. The data found was then analyzed with SPSS and Microsoft Excel to find the significance of the results.

The findings show that the highway projects that are using modular construction in their execution are still facing increments in the budgeted cost and delays, it was also discovered that the reason for this were external factors which included; delay of delivery of materials, lack of enough suppliers, the complex tenure system making it difficult to acquire land and so on. The research also covers the usage level prefabricated construction on highway projects in Kampala which turn out to be very high. Therefore, the aim of this research was to find out why highway projects extensively using modular construction are still facing cost overruns and delays, yet it is a solution to all these problems according to literature.