Challenges and opportunities for productivity improvement studies in linear, repetitive, and location-based scheduling

Abstract

Despite theoretical advancements in alternative project planning methods the extent of their practical implementation varies strongly; it has been limited especially in the US construction industry. The family of linear, repetitive, and location-based scheduling techniques holds significant but barely substantiated promise by containing multiple variables of interest for integrated analysis and optimization. Yet it is necessary to provide empirical evidence that using such techniques can improve productivity to increase credibility and acceptance by practitioners, because claims of conceptual superiority are only sporadically supported with detailed measures. An analysis is performed to identify relevant decision-making variables, extract challenges that currently limit the corpus of quantitative productivity studies on alternative scheduling to its insufficient size, and reveal opportunities to expand it in breadth and depth. Variables are categorized by their relevance to time, activity, resource and location, as well as the managerial approach. Challenges include the diverse definitions of productivity itself, issues related to achieving generalizability, and the detailed steps of data collection, preparation, and analysis. Opportunities include the guidance from existing but rare studies and well-established research methods such as case studies that can be applied. This is illustrated with a sample project of a high-rise apartment building in Brazil. If alternative methods can be proven to be measurably better for specific applications, there might be a paradigm shift from merely defaulting to traditional but problematic network-based scheduling toward consciously choosing the planning method based on its potential benefits for a project.

Why Would Location-Based Scheduling Be Applicable for Offshore Oil and Gas Construction?

“…The offshore oil and gas literature indicated a preference for using CPM as other industries (Galloway 2006), when planning construction (Carvalho and Pinto 2006;Gomarn and Pongpeng 2018;Norstad et al 2017;Sabri et al 2015), production (Findlay et al 1989;Lang and Zhao 2016) and maintenance (Alonso et al 2018;Halvorsen-Weare and Fagerholt 2017). None of these consider resource leveling or workflow as Olivieri et al (2018), neither did they consider productivity as Lucko et al (2014) and Seppänen et al (2014). In comparison to the provided CPM schedule the LBMS schedule illustrated inconsistency, which supports Olivieri et al (2018) results, but they also found that CPM had similar feature for critical activities.…”

Location-based highway construction planning using geographic information systems

“…This is important information for the planning of lengthy projects like highways. Apart from this, there is other information that is easily available on location-based scheduling charts such as lead time, synchrony, concurrency, work-in-progress, sequence, direction, interfering trades and buffer (Lucko et al 2014).…”

Linha de balanço – uma síntese dos princípios de produção enxuta aplicados à programação de obras?

“…Esta desvantagem é contornada pela utilização de gráficos coloridos (ARDITI; ALBULAK, 1986) ou formação de células de produção. Uma revisão atualizada de artigos de LOB foi realizada por Lucko et al (2013) em um trabalho que objetiva preencher a lacuna de conhecimento sobre estudos quantitativos de produtividade em planejamento por linha de balanço.…”

“…Trabalhos assinalam o uso da LOB apenas como uma ferramenta de planejamento na implantação da construção enxuta (SOUZA ET AL., 2005; BARBOSA ET AL., 2013), mas há autores que exploraram a Linha de Balanço como uma ferramenta que detém várias características lean (MATOS ET Al., 2009;MONTEIRO ET Al., 2011;CARNEIRO ET AL., 2012;LUCKO ET AL., 2013;HEINECK, 2014).…”