Module-based construction schedule administration for public infrastructure agencies

Infrastructure projects such as the construction of expressways are often distributed over different regions and must therefore be divided into several tendering packages. The public agencies that administrate such projects manage project packages that must be integrated. All project packages may involve similar work. However, they are carried out by different contractors each with their own scheduling practices. Standardization provides a foundation for more efficient and effective schedule integration, but cannot easily be enforced without objections from contractors. This paper presents a three-stage standardization implementation framework using modularization. A set of network modules that involve normal, repetitive, cyclic, and merging activities was developed for expressway projects. Two computer systems were developed to help contractors use these modules to create schedules, and to help the owner review schedules submitted by contractors. Experiments and a survey were also carried out to validate the proposed framework, demonstrating a significant amount of time saving and errors reduced by using network modules.