A Mapping Based Approach To Schedule Integration In Heterogeneous Environments
Mohsin Siddiqui, William James O'Brien, Ting-Kwei Wang · Proceedings of the Joint CIB W78, W102, ICCCBE, ICCC, and DMUCE International Conference on Computing and Decision Making in Civil and Building Engineering, Montreal, Canada, 14-16 June · 2006
Construction schedules are one of the most important project controls for construction project management. Schedule coordination traditionally has been a distributed and iterative exercise in which the General Contractor maintains the master schedule and the other participants schedule their activities using their individual constraint information. This paper introduces the concept of schedule mappings as a way to establish links between multiple participant schedules representing the same construction activity. Coordinating activities in a disconnected heterogeneous environment, where participants use different scheduling methods and model activities at various levels of details, is a challenging exercise which is not amply supported and explored by existing research. Coordination is usually an ongoing repetitive effort taken on by the General Contractor. Schedule mappings provide a structured mechanism to represent and share schedules and related process information across firms allowing rapid evaluation of schedule alternatives in response to a schedule change. We can view the shared schedule and process information at multiple levels of detail.