A significant proportion of construction projects are failing to achieve their deadline finish dates. This advocate for solutions that could address the root causes of time impacting risks, leading ...to the use of 4D building information modeling (BIM) for project planning. This study investigates the impacts of 4D BIM on construction projects. An exploratory sequential mixed method research was conducted to initially explore the topic via interviews and literature review, and, subsequently, the themes derived were put into questionnaires to elicit expert knowledge on a wider industry scale. The data were analyzed using thematic analysis, reliability analysis, Kruskal-Wallis test and factor analysis. Across the objectives around the impacts of 4D BIM on project reliability, monitoring and diagnosis, the findings presented eight key ways the 4D BIM support project performance. Examples of component factors that were raised was planning efficiency to enhance planner output, assessment and directive with a better comparison of planned and actual progress, and thorough/comprehensive risk reflection to cover wide ranges of issues. Upon further reflection, the finding highlighted the issues of the lack of shared responsibility outside of the planner and BIM coordinator, severe lack of understanding and training regarding 4D BIM and complexity of carrying out the process effectively.
The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic has profound socio-economic consequences. Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures, so this paper focuses on radical changes to accepted practice in project ...organizing in response. In particular, we focus on schedule compression to deliver outputs to mitigate the immediate impact of the pandemic on health. In the spirit of engaged scholarship, which is problem-driven rather than theory-driven, we address directly the evidence of what happened in two empirical vignettes and one more substantial case study – the CoronavirusUY app; emergency field hospitals; and vaccine development. We then suggest the implications for project management theory in discussion.
•Radical changes to accepted practices in project organizing in response to COVID-19 Pandemic.•Selectionism, agile, sponsorship, schedule compression.•Implications for project management theory.
Abstract
With the development of the information age, the application scope of big data technology is becoming more and more extensive. The rapid development of big data technology provides strong ...support for the collection and storage of massive data. Mining potential value through data analysis and providing scientific support for decision makers. This paper combines data collection and analysis with project schedule management. First, it introduces the data collection and analysis technology in general, then explains the disadvantages of traditional project schedule management, analyzes the advantages of modern project schedule management, and finally proposes project schedule management data collection and analysis. The design idea of the system is applied to the project management practice of a material acceptance point in a government office, in order to provide a useful reference for the application of data collection and analysis technology in project schedule management.
For complex new product development (NPD) projects, traditional planning techniques have failed in realistic planning. Consequently, project performance has poor results, despite the dissemination of ...project management knowledge. This research aims to investigate the relationship between product complexity and team seniority as planning parameters for the NPD project, exploring the effect on project performance. The research applies a system dynamics model for simulating the influence of these parameters on project performance, particularly relating schedule and scope dimensions. In this article, we compare the impact of different relations between product complexity and team seniority on three projects in order to test the method. Only the product primary functions must be taken into account for gathering data from product complexity, and team seniority must be known. Besides, the decision-maker applies a first-order linear model to a goal-seeking background to predict the project schedule for a specified product scope. The results show that the model predicts the project schedule performance with an error of less than 15%, as compared to the actual projects' performance.
The available slack-based methods for measuring the robustness of schedule networks do not pay sufficient attention to the structural characteristics of such networks nor do they provide a comparison ...point for measuring the sensitivity to changes. This research fills these gaps by addressing a core research question: How can an integrative measure of schedule robustness be developed? To answer this question, this paper performs a centrality analysis to capture the structural characteristics of the schedule network. Further, it draws on the concept of perfect uniformity to establish a baseline for measuring the degree of schedule sensitivity to disruptions. Finally, it uses entropy theory to develop an integrative measure of schedule robustness by combining two classes of robustness measures: quality and solution robustness. An experimental analysis is undertaken to evaluate the statistical performance of the new measure. The validation results show a high inverse correlation between the proposed measure and a cost-based indicator of schedule performance; in turn, proving the better performance of the new measure compared to the two widely discussed and quoted slack-based measures of robustness. This can be ascribed to the ability of the new measure to simultaneously capture various attributes of a schedule network. The results of this research can assist decision makers in making informed decisions in the appraisal and monitoring phases of construction projects. This research provides the opportunity for future studies to extend the proposed method by incorporating resource-constrained and cost-related attributes of project activities into the formulation of schedule robustness.
•We have previously developed an algorithm that reads the BIM.•It also calculates the structural dependencies of the elements and stores them in a matrix.•We demonstrated how this matrix can be used ...for developing construction schedules.•We showed how functions of the GA should be developed for the purpose of this research.•The entire algorithm is capable of generating structurally stable project schedules.
The construction project schedule is one of the most important tools for project managers in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry that makes them able to track and manage the time, cost, and quality (a.k.a. Project Management Triangle) of projects. Developing project schedules is almost always troublesome, since it is heavily dependent on project planners’ knowledge of work packages, on-the-job-experience, planning capability and oversight. Having a thorough understanding of the project geometries and their internal interacting stability relations plays a significant role in generating practical construction sequencing. On the other hand, the new concept of embedding all the project information into a 3-dimensional representation of a project (a.k.a. Building Information Model or BIM) has recently drawn attention to the construction industry.
In this paper, the authors demonstrate a novel approach of retrieving enough information from the BIM of a project and then develop construction sequencing for the installation of the project elements. For this reason a computer application is developed that can automatically derive a structurally (statically) stable construction sequence, using the concept of the Genetic Algorithm (GA). The term “structurally stable sequencing” in this article refers to the sequencing order of erection in which the structure remains statically stable locally and globally during the entire installation process. To validate the proposed methodology, the authors designed 21 different experiments and used the proposed method for generating stable construction schedules, which all were successfully accomplished. Therefore, this methodology proposes a novel approach of construction project application of the GA, as an Expert System tool.
This paper addresses project portfolio selection with divisibility, where cash flow and opportunity cost are simultaneously considered for the first time. If a project is selected, fixed assets ...required to execute the project will be occupied during its lifetime. The opportunity cost should be considered due to the commitment of fixed assets. An integrated profit analysis method is proposed to simultaneously consider cash flow and opportunity cost in divisible project portfolio selection. To derive the combination of projects as well as the schedule of selected projects, a mixed integer linear program is provided. A real-world case is used to illustrate the capability and characteristics of our proposed models.
Access to sufficient and safe water particularly in vulnerable countries is one of the most important goals targeted by the United Nations for 2030. The agricultural water supply is crucial in arid ...areas such as Iran. In water supply projects, employers usually seek less duration and cost, and higher quality, however, contractors seek a reduction of fluctuations in project resources, especially human resources, and these goals may be in conflict with each other. Therefore, finding an optimal project schedule considering different project objectives is vital for managers to achieve stakeholders' satisfaction. In this study, the four main project objectives including time, cost, quality, and resource leveling as well as the activity dependencies and resource constraints are addressed through fuzzy optimization. The proposed model was first implemented on a small-sized project instance for validation; then, the model was solved by the Nondominated Sorting Genetic (NSGA-II) and Multi-objective Particle Swarm Optimization algorithms using the information of a real-world agricultural water supply project. The results of the first Pareto set for different alpha-cuts in relation to the fuzzy quality factor show a set of solutions and different alternatives for project implementation which leads to a number of execution modes each of which may result in achieving the project objectives. Finally, the most ideal solution with a duration of 178 days was selected using the fuzzy TOPSIS method. The findings demonstrate the validity of the proposed model concerning the needs of agricultural water supply organizations.
The construction schedule is the most important construction document as it indicates total project duration, project stages and times of activities, costs, logical sequences, quality and safety. ...Hence, the quality of a phase schedule presented by a contractor must be assessed by the owner’s consultant either before the commencement of works or during the bidding phase. Only few international standards concerning schedule quality exist, and most of them are not specific for construction. A construction-oriented schedule quality evaluation procedure, based upon a set of 75 requirements has been proposed. Three different versions of a construction schedule for a case study of a seismic rehabilitation project have been evaluated with the aim of performing the proposed method’s proof-of-concept.
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