The protection of Polish architectural heritage in the former eastern borderlands, accomplished through the conservation and technical securing of historical structures, constitutes one of the main programmes that are implemented by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. Currently, many Polish historical buildings in the former eastern borderlands are in a very bad technical condition. The load-bearing systems of these elements, as well as elements of their finish, require immediate emergency securing work. The basic steps that precede conservation work are emergency structural works, which guarantee the durability and stability of the entire historical substance. The specifics and complexity of the problem of the failure of historical buildings often demands an in-depth analysis of a series of factors that are difficult to measure and which are responsible for the cause and effect relationship during the early stage of the technical evaluation of a structure. The analyses of failures of numerous historical structures, for instance that were carried out by the authors, have become the inspiration for the search for effective methods of analysis that would allow for an in-depth analysis of the causes and effects of the failures in question. The DEMATEL method (Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory) that has been presented in this work, and its fuzzy extension, has lately become one of the more popular methods used in the cause-and-effect analysis of various phenomena. The authors demonstrated how this method works on the example of the evaluation and securing of the load-bearing system of the XVII Collegiate church of the Holy Trinity in the town of Olykha in the Volhynskiy Oblast, Ukraine.

The article proposes a new approach to the identification of key agents, knowledge and resources required to complete tasks being performed as a part of construction projects. The author used the concept of meta-networks to model the relations between agents, knowledge, resources and tasks of a project. Up until now, the identification of key means of production employed a measure of performance of the project that was modelled using a metanetwork. However, this measure is limited as it does not take into consideration the significance of individual tasks or the relations between them. The author thus proposed a structural modification of the performance measure for the purposes of identifying key agents, knowledge and resources of a planned project. A case study analysis has confirmed the application potential of the proposed approach. In practice, the results that were obtained can aid planners in evaluating the performance of a project's plan. Information about key agents, knowledge and resources can constitute the basis for drafting alternative plans which would be more resistant to failure due to the possible loss of key means of production over the course of carrying out a project.

The article highlights the fact that numerous key decisions in temporary construction organisations are made as a result of informal, non-contractual relationships between organisation members that are not a result of formal organisational structures. These hidden relationships can be visualised in the form of social networks and Social Network Analysis methods (SNA) can be used to perform their structural analysis. In latest studies on self-organising networks in the construction sector, researchers have mostly focused on the design phase of large construction projects, e.g. infrastructural ones. Meanwhile, there exists a need for similar research to focus on temporary organisations created for the purpose of performing construction work. The authors took up this subject and examined a self-organising network of communication between the participants of the construction of a multi-family residential complex located in Katowice, Poland. The structural analysis of this network facilitated its in-depth understanding and identifying certain flaws and dysfunctions concerning individual participants of this project, which became a basis for further discussion. At the same time, the authors highlighted the benefits of managing such a self-organising network in the context of the effective achievement of project goals.

The goal of the article is the diagnosis and presentation of the problems of the selection of construction technologies for buildings being built in the centres of urban agglomerations. The survey and literature studies that were performed show that the process of selecting these technologies is difficult due to a series of very different difficulties associated with constructing a structure in a city centre and which are sometimes hard to foresee. At the same time there is a lack of decision-making support tools dedicated to the selection of construction technologies that would take into account the problems that occur during the construction of buildings in city centres. The study shows the need to discuss the subject of developing a mathematical model and a decision-making support tool based on said model to that end.

Construction projects are characterised by complexity in the technical, organisational and environmental sphere. The organisational complexity of such projects makes it necessary to manage relationships between actors who fulfil various functions. Formal organisational structures that have been developed for this purpose do not always reflect the actual relationships between construction project participants. In literature, scholars more and more often point to the need to identify and monitor such informal relationships and attempt to manage them in order to effectively carry out projects. Structural analysis of so-called self-organising networks of relationships between project participants is carried out on the basis of established structural measures by performing Social Network Analysis (SNA). In a situation when inappropriate communication between project participants relative to management staff expectations is detected, interventions meant to improve communication in such networks are possible. The goal of the article is proposing an optimisation-oriented approach to planning such interventions while taking various constraints, such as communication costs, into consideration. As a part of this optimisation, the authors proposed a method from the heuristic methods group. This solution will support decision-making in terms of intervening within an informal relationship structure. The method was presented on the example of an actual construction project involving the construction of a complex of housing buildings. the self-organising network structure was defined on the basis of a survey carried out among the project's participants and concerned communication between them over a four-week period. As a result of the structural network analysis, abnormalities in communication between project participants were detected. The optimisation method developed by the authors pointed to possibilities of improving communication effectiveness within this network. The effects of the analysis confirmed the application potential of the method that was presented.