A Planning and Scheduling Paradigm for Construction Strategy of a Building Rehabilitation Project

Strategic decisions for a construction project play a fundamental role in the search for project success. The use of a process-based paradigm for planning and scheduling can help construction managers to create different production scenarios to choose the more suitable strategy for a building construction project. Rehabilitation construction projects have some specific features. First of all the existing building creates a spatial constraint for building activities, in terms of accessibility and layout of working placement, i.e. space for construction operations, and in terms of transportation of building materials and transportation and use of machines and equipment. On the other hand, the possibility of contemporary or overlapping construction operations, because of the structure of the locations of the building, can give flexibility to the planning of activities, i.e. different alternatives for the sequence of the operations. Construction project managers need to simulate with precision and realism the construction process to create these different scenarios, with the aim of optimizing production processes as to reach project objectives. This task can be accomplished through a planning and scheduling paradigm based upon the project Location Breakdown Structure (LBS) and the Precedence Diagramming networking technique plotted on a resource – space chart. A case study of an existing building rehabilitation project has been used to compare the project schedule prepared by the owner for the bid phase and the different scenarios created by the company for the construction phase. The proposed planning and scheduling paradigm can be used to optimize the construction strategy, especially in building rehabilitation projects where multiple choices for activity sequencing are possible. Future research work will entail the evaluation of the quality of the schedule created with the proposed method.