Planning and Control of Modular Building Construction Projects Using Discrete-Event Simulation

Abstract

The modular building construction project demands has been increasing in the construction industry. However, the results of recent research show that the benefits of the schedules of modular building construction are not as per our expectation. One of the reasons is that the scheduling of conventional construction is applied instead of project planning and control which reflects the characteristics of the modular building construction project constraints and market change flows of modular building construction. Moreover, apart from large construction markets and project sizes companies are faced with a new challenge in their project planning and execution process because of the change from Finish-to-Start work precedence to concurrent work. The concurrent work in modular construction defines that the manufacturing production for constructing a main structure and foundation work for installing a manufactured structure have same Start- To- Finish dates. However, in large-scale projects and increasing modular building construction markets, the previous concurrent work definition is changing as the manufacturing and on-site installation durations are overlapped. This is because of the fact that the previous Finish-To-Start work precedence is not enough to finish the project until the end of the project dates and total number of modular units exceeds the factory storage yard capacity. To address these problems, this research suggested and developed a simulation model for optimizing project resources and schedule of volumetric modular building construction. This simulation model aims at improving a project managers understanding of the overall modular building construction project process and providing a reliable resource allocation methods. As a technical approach, this research used a discrete event simulation method to implement the repetitive working on the modular building construction project to enable project schedules from the modular project managers perspective. From an academic point of view, this research showed that the scheduling of the modular construction method requires to be concurrent rather than conventional.