RISim: Resource-Interacted Simulation Modeling in Construction

Discrete-event simulation is an effective approach to analyze construction operations. However, it is usually time-consuming and knowledge demanding to develop a practical simulation model, and thus not cost-effective due to the uniqueness and relatively short life of construction projects. The capability of discrete-event simulation modeling has not been popularly recognized by site managers until recently. A clear and explicit solution is to simplify and speed up the model development cycle, so as to enable users without much knowledge of simulation technology to easily generate a model in a relatively short period of time. In this paper, a resource-interacted simulation (RISim) modeling approach is presented, which adopts a resource oriented methodology to promote an intuitive feel to simulation modeling. In RISim, an operation is modeled in two abstraction levels—namely, the resource level and process level. An operation is viewed as a collection of resources and their interactions. Complex resources ...