Modeling of functional construction requirements for constructability analysis

Evaluating construction requirements should be an indispensable part of improving the constructability of a facility project. However, a number of existing function analysis approaches focus mainly on the final functions with respect to the finished facility. The construction industry still lacks methodologies to represent and evaluate the functional construction requirements for constructability analysis. This paper develops the concept of intermediate functions for representing the construction requirements from three perspectives, namely, function user, function provider, and the temporal and spatial relationships between the user and the provider. This is followed by the development of an in-progress product model to abstract the construction lifecycle of a facility product utilizing the concept of component state. Furthermore, the reference relationships among such perspectives as in-progress product, intermediate function, resource, and process are addressed. Based on these reference relationships, the bottleneck states for providing the intermediate functions can be detected. A case study of constructing the deck of a bridge using the balanced cantilever approach is presented to illustrate the utilization of this concept and representation.