SITUATION BASED MODELING FOR CONSTRUCTION PRODUCTIVITY

Both published and unpublished reports show that, in construction projects, site productivity losses range from 40% - 60%. Productivity is an important issue in construction because of the interaction among labor, capital, materials, and equipment. Construction site operations are also very complex, and they involve complicated relationships among numerous tasks. During construction, various factors, obstacles, uncertainties, and triggering situations affect a site’s productivity within these relationships or tasks. Understanding the impact of various triggering situations on productivity could definitely improve the performance of and create value for the construction industry. The tool explained in this paper directly investigates and models these triggering situations to predict productivity using a modeling technique called situation-based simulation modeling. This tool and methodology could also model the causeand-effect relationships among various triggering situations that previous construction models have ignored. The simulation results not only are able to predict productivity very closely to the actual productivity observed at construction sites, but also provide recommendations to mitigate problematic situations to improve productivity.