The importance of integrating construction knowledge into the design process has long been recognized by the construction industry. This paper studies early contractor involvement in design and its impact on construction schedule performance through a combined empirical case study and theoretical simulation analysis. Pipe and steel fabricators' inputs at different design stages of industrial construction projects are identified. The case study shows that these inputs lead to improved drawing quality, material supply, information flow, and consequently improved construction schedule performance. This impact on construction schedule is illustrated using actual project data and simulation techniques. Simulation models were developed to demonstrate intuitively the impact at the construction operation level and they allow people to gain management insights through simulation experiments. Better understanding of the early contractor involvement process and its benefit can improve buy-in and help industry practitioners to reach the full potential of this concept.

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Construction system modeling aims to improve construction work performance by tracking the dynamic behaviors of construction systems. More accurate system modeling can be achieved by considering the mutual effects of construction operations on the context level of the system. Hybrid models of discrete event simulation (DES) and system dynamics aim to capture these mutual effects to provide model developers with more precise system analysis. Although system dynamics models are used to capture the behavior of the system at the context level, DES models are utilized to capture construction operations. The potential benefits of utilizing hybrid models for complex systems have been argued and established, but there are still limited studies that have utilized this modeling approach for real construction systems. In this research, we have attempted to identify the challenging issues that have caused this problem and to confront this problem by proposing a hybrid framework and architecture, which address these challenges. To verify the effectiveness of the new model, the performance of the proposed hybrid modeling framework and architecture has been tested by applying the proposed model in a realscale construction-related system.