Brodetskaia, I; Sacks, R and Shapira, A (2013) Stabilizing production flow of interior and finishing works with reentrant flow in building construction. Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, 139(6), pp. 665-674. ISSN 0733-9364
Abstract
Interior and finishing activities in building construction exhibit high degrees of variation as a result of uncertainty in supply chains, variations in work quantities, client changes, and lack of predictability of the production capacity of subcontracting trades. Decisions must constantly be made concerning effective utilization of available resources. Reentrant workflow patterns, where a trade crew returns multiple times to the same space, make production control particularly difficult. We present a method for pull flow control at the operational level through real-time prioritization of pending work packages and daily regulation of crew assignments and trades' production capacities. Application of various heuristics was evaluated using discrete-event simulation of a representative construction project. The experimental results emphasize the importance of dynamic control of allocation of production resources to those mature activities that ensure subsequent (downstream) flow. The most successful policy was to use the second reentrant activity as a bottleneck and to regulate the capacity of the trade with reentrant flows to ensure sufficient feeding of new work to successive crews.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | computer-aided simulation; contractors; flow control; lean construction; production management; subcontractors |
| Index terms: | dynamic control, variation, building construction, lean construction, construction project, regulation, computer aided simulation, package, production control, heuristic, subcontracting, production management, subcontractor, workflow |
| Subjects: | building construction, political science, risk assessment, practitioner, organization, contractual condition, control systems, contractual arrangements, project delivery, management, modelling and simulation, production management |
| Topics: | Project Management, Construction Technology, Supply Chain Management, Governance, Procurement, Business Strategy, Site Management, Contract Administration, Risk Management, Digital Applications, Roles and Professions, Engineering Principles |
| Descriptive scope: | 3 PCA |
N.B. Descriptive scope is a count of how many of the five facets of empirical research are indicated by the words used in title, abstract and keywords. It is not intended as a judgement on the research; merely a count of the kind of word we would expect to indicate Phenomenon, Concepts, Theoretical framing, Empirical techniques, Analytical techniques. If all five are present, then a code of “5 PCTEA” will indicate this. If you feel the coding for this record is questionable, we welcome discussion around the terms we matched or the way we categorized them. The facet you would expect may not be coded, or a facet may be coded inappropriately. This can also bear on a larger question, of which facets should be treated as defining in construction management research. Please get in touch, and we will look at it. More details here