Modeling construction site productivity using situation-based simulation tool

Abstract

Both published and unpublished reports show that site productivity losses in construction projects range from 40% to 60%. Productivity improvement is an important and valuable issue to both the industrial and academic area. Construction site operations are very complex, and they involve complicated, relationships among numerous tasks, factors, obstacles, uncertainties, or triggering situations that affect the productivity. Understanding the impact of these triggering situations on productivity would be necessary to improve the performance of the construction operations. This thesis directly investigates and models these triggering situations to predict productivity using a modeling technique called situation-based simulation modeling. This modeling tool can model the cause-and-effect relationships among various triggering situations that previous construction models have ignored. More than 1700 working hours of construction operations were directly observed and recorded as the source data of the development of the model. The simulation results not only are able to predict productivity very closely to the actual productivity observed at the site, but also provide recommendations to mitigate problematic situations to improve productivity.