Making Each Workhour Count: Improving the Prediction of Construction Durations and Resource Allocations

Fischer, Martin; Garcia-Lopez, Nelly P.; Morkos, René

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-91635-4_15

Cited by 10 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Operational advantages also emerge from a repetitive sequence of actions, reducing the time needed for retraining and implementation. Using standardization, Fischer et al developed a methodology for predicting delays in projects where only the actual and target times, as well as the reasons for the delay, had to be updated regularly [26].…”

Section: General Standardization Of Construction Processesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Development of a Novel Production Model for Labour Productivity: Modular Construction Toolkit Design

Geiger,

Hock,

Nübel

2023

Buildings

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The building industry faces a number of prominent challenges in the coming period. In this article, we focus on productivity in construction, which lags behind other industries despite technological developments. There is an urgent need for more efficient production methods. In other words, the potential for increasing productivity in construction is enormous. As in other industries, the key to this lies in process orientation, process standardization, and digitization. Lean construction approaches offer innovative solutions here by aiming to maximize customer value while minimizing waste, applying the principles of lean production to construction processes. However, building products are distinct in nature. Efforts to standardize them have achieved partial success, but only within specific product categories and for certain customer needs. Most construction activities remain highly unique. An alternative solution lies in standardizing work processes and not the final product. By adopting this method, one can considerably decrease individuality in production without compromising the essential uniqueness of the building product. Consequently, it is crucial to gain a deeper understanding of the standardization of production processes and the dynamics within the construction sector. This article introduces a modular construction toolkit designed to standardize production processes at construction sites. This toolkit consists of a series of consistent process steps, each linked to a standard time metric. Using this classification, a production model is constructed from a select number of recurring processes, leading to an ontological representation of production. This modular approach allows diverse production processes to be compared based on productivity, as they are composed of consistent and comparable sub-processes. Such a comparison is crucial for continuous production optimization. This method also enables the pinpointing of the most wasteful processes across various construction sites. While the primary data generation use case is centred on special civil engineering (special foundation engineering), the core concepts can be applied to general building construction.

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Section: General Standardization Of Construction Processesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Development of a Novel Production Model for Labour Productivity: Modular Construction Toolkit Design

Geiger,

Hock,

Nübel

2023

Buildings

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“…While computer-based 2D space modeling programs like AutoCAD, vector graphics, and 3D wireframes already were used in the 1980s to plan construction work, it is not until the rapid increase in computer power and advancements in computer graphics, combined with a decrease in the cost of hardware, leading to the advent of building information modeling (BIM) in the mid-1990s that spatiotemporal modeling became commonplace in construction. A chronological sample of the literature might include: Tommelein (1991), Thabet and Beliveau (1994), Cheng and O'Connor (1996), McKinney et al (1996), Akinci and Fischer (2000), Cheng and Yang (2001), Akinci et al (2002), Guo (2002), Sriprasert and Dawood (2003), Hosny (2013), Hosny et al (2013), Kim et al (2013), Liu et al (2015), Fischer et al (2018), andFrancis (2019). It is not our intent to review here what is now a substantial body of literature on this subject, addressing issues of representation, model functionality and model use in pursuit of optimization.…”

Section: Time and Space Representations Used In Construction Managementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visual Management of Daily Construction Site Space Use

Bascoul

Tommelein

Douthett

2020

Front. Built Environ.

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Space is a construction resource not to be overlooked during project scheduling, production planning, and control. When space use over time is not planned, trades may get stacked in areas of the jobsite that are labor intensive, which may hamper productivity and cause safety concerns. Augmenting traditional scheduling representations, spatiotemporal modeling in construction considers both space and time to depict ongoing construction work. This paper presents a simple space scheduling program called LoSite that helps workers involved in doing the work visualize the work schedule, facilitates production control, and fosters transparency in daily coordination of work space among trades. LoSite was implemented in Microsoft Excel. The researchers prototyped, deployed, and tested the space scheduling program to visualize construction work being done during the interiors phase of an open-space office building. Successes of the program as well as limitations to its full adoption by the team are discussed in this paper. LoSite delivers proof-of-concept that spaceuse visualization, even on a large-scale project, can be accomplished effectively using software that is readily available and familiar to many people.

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“…During production control, field managers track the status of the activities and flows, which are used by the AFM to compute activity and flow variation metrics. The AFM leverages activity and flow data collected during production control to generate analytics and statistically significant predictions about the downstream activities that are most likely to face variations (Fischer et al 2018). In test projects, these analytics and predictions have been used to allocate resources, size buffers, and modify the lookahead schedule aiming at improving schedule conformance (Garcia-Lopez 2017).…”

Section: Activity-flow Model (Afm)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Work Structuring for Flow

Garcia-Lopez¹,

Fischer²,

Alarcón³

2019

Proc. 27th Annual Conference of the International Group for Lean Construction (IGLC)

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Achieving smooth production flow has been one of the main objectives underlying lean manufacturing and construction. To achieve production flow, field managers rely on work structuring methods to enable them to structure activities and flows. Current work structuring methods enable field managers to structure activities, but they do not explicitly represent all seven construction flows or their movement through the project. Hence, field managers rely on their intuition and tacit understanding of flow sequencing, which can cause communication problems between stakeholders resulting in delays and productivity loss. This paper presents a work structuring method that allows field managers to explicitly represent construction activities, flows, and flow movement through the project. The work structuring method was tested prospectively at three construction sites with different scopes and planning methods. The work structuring method allows field managers to generate activity and flow-based schedules to plan and control the project. Furthermore, it improves stakeholder understanding of the plan by visually representing activities' and flows' interdependencies.

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Making Each Workhour Count: Improving the Prediction of Construction Durations and Resource Allocations

Cited by 10 publications

References 18 publications

Development of a Novel Production Model for Labour Productivity: Modular Construction Toolkit Design

Development of a Novel Production Model for Labour Productivity: Modular Construction Toolkit Design

Visual Management of Daily Construction Site Space Use

Work Structuring for Flow

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