Comprehensive Repetitive Scheduling for Linear and Scattered Infrastructure Projects
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Date
2022-05-16
Authors
Ojulari, Saidat
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Waterloo
Abstract
The majority of civil infrastructure projects involve activities that are repeated across a number of units (e.g., linear highway sections; or scattered multi-bridge repairs). While repetition represents a potential for benefiting from the economy of scale, reality is far different and infrastructure projects continue to exhibit large cost overruns, delays, and disputes. With existing solutions for scheduling repetitive projects unable to adequately cater to infrastructure projects, more efficient tools are needed to support efficient planning and resource management for such projects. To address this need, this research introduces a comprehensive scheduling framework able to address the unique challenges and decision-support requirements for linear and scattered projects. The framework presented improves on the existing integrated critical path method & line-of-balance repetitive scheduling formulation to better achieve synchronized completion of a project’s activities, which reduces both time and cost. The proposed framework also incorporates procedures to resolve resource constraints at both the individual-resource and the crew levels as well. To address the lack of efficient repetitive-scheduling solutions, a new easy-to-use interactive scheduling tool has been developed to combine the benefits of CPM/LOB calculations with the introduced schedule improvements, along with new clearer visualizations of all schedule details (i.e., activities, units, crews etc.). The scheduling improvements proposed in this research and the developed scheduling tool prototype were validated on case studies and proved to greatly facilitate the efficient planning and delivery for repetitive infrastructure projects, which represent an increasing portion of construction business and are most challenging to execute.
Description
Keywords
repetitive scheduling, repetitive projects, construction projects, infrastructure projects, construction software tools, construction project scheduling, construction project planning, construction project management, project management, linear projects, scattered projects, CPM, CPM/LOB, scheduling tool, repetitive infrastructure project, civil infrastructure projects, resource management, repetitive project visualization, critical path method, line-of-balance