Resource – Space Charts for Construction Workspace Scheduling

Construction production is typically highly dependent upon space to move, store and fabricate materials and building components, and to perform transformation and assembling activities. Construction planning and scheduling goal is to provide a logical order for activities taking into account safety, space and logic requirements. Construction process scheduling should also incorporate specific features of work-flows of project activities through work spaces. The Location-Based Management System (LBMS) is a recent and innovative method that aims at planning and managing construction projects in a process-oriented way, taking into account activity locations on-site. In an on-going research an improved scheduling method for construction operations has been developed, based on a CPM - Precedence Network plotted on a Resource–Space chart. Space Units of the project work are identified by a Location Breakdown Structure (LBS) like in the LBM System, and project activities are identified by a two dimensions coordinate system based on Resources (i.e. construction crews) and working Spaces (e.g. floors of a multi-storey building). As the Precedence Network is plotted on a resource – space chart, Space Units can be characterized by a maximum resource capacity number for each activity type, thus defining the available space capacity of working crews. In this way project scheduler can verify the quality of the produced schedule during the planning and scheduling process, as dimensions of workspaces and their congestion limits, safety spaces and protection spaces can be easily verified. The method has been tested on a sample project. The proposed scheduling approach can help unexperienced project schedulers to identify specific resource requirements for spaces needed for activities, and to define locations of these spaces and resources on building site. The proposed approach can be useful especially in case of project acceleration and time-cost trade-off, helping the project team to produce an efficient construction schedule.