Delivering London 2012: site-wide logistics

Abstract

The UK Olympic Delivery Authority began to define the methodology for an ambitious construction programme on the 2·7 km2 Olympic Park site for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, which came with significant constraints. The construction programme included 14 Games time venues and other buildings; the infrastructure and utilities sufficient to service a small town; 300 residential and commercial buildings to be demolished and 2·6 million m3 of soil to be remediated. This £6 billion construction programme was to be completed in 3·5 years. At its peak this resulted in 4500 vehicle movements each day, 81 tier 1 contractors, and 3000 tier 2 contractors together with their subcontractors and suppliers and up to 9000 people involved in construction.

Editorial

“…The paper that I found particularly interesting and timely is that by Shiplee et al (2013), who report on the design and implementation of the project for providing site-wide logistics support for the delivery of the infrastructure projects for the 2012 London Olympic and Paralympic Games. The paper traces the development of the methodology for the logistics project to December 2005 when, the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA), the project owner recognized the need for a logistics project to establish programme-wide arrangements for the management of logistics in relation to people, materials, temporary infrastructure, programme-wide issues around very daunting constraints of delivery time, existing infrastructure operating at design capacity, and contiguous residential communities.…”