Abstract
In Hong Kong, 6-day construction cycle always being used for constructing one typical floor of concrete building superstructure in a week. Work-zones are defined in the working platform for better allocation of limited resources. Once the work-zones are defined, the resources (labour, plant, materials) will be allocated to a specific zone to deliver the works on a particular day of the 6-day construction cycle. In practice, the definition of work-zone is dependent on the experience of project manager. Yet, there is no past research studied the evaluation of work-zone definition schemes. As such, in this research study, three heuristic rules are proposed for choosing better scheme of work-zone. The heuristic rules are based on (i) lengths of work-zone dividing line, (ii) fluctuations of daily duration, and (iii) utilisation rates of resource. To illustrate the steps of evaluating the scheme, an illustrative example is given. To illustrate the method application of the rules, a practical case study of constructing a 40-storey housing is given. The proposed rules were verified based on sensitivity analysis and expert validation. Conclusions are drawn by expressing the contributions and limitations of the proposed rules, followed by suggesting future research works.
Highlights
In building construction, before constructing a concrete superstructure on site, work-zones are defined for facilitating worker allocation by project managers
Project managers are responsible for planning and scheduling the workflows of the skilled workers for delivering the concrete superstructure such that the project can be completed on time, while the foremen of the skilled workers of particular work trades are responsible for estimating the quantities of skilled workers required to deliver the site works of the projects constrained by the project delivery time planned by the project managers
Since the skilled workers of particular trades carried out the site works in different days of a week, the work sequence of different work trades in a particular workzone must be followed in accordance with the technological relationships, while the work continuity of the worker trades in all work-zone must be guaranteed such that the skilled workers can be fully utilised
Summary
Before constructing a concrete superstructure on site, work-zones are defined for facilitating worker allocation by project managers. This research explored and proposed a new set of heuristic rules for analytically evaluating the options of any available schemes of work-zone definitions given by the project managers in building superstructure construction from the perspectives of time scheduling and operation simulation. The research scope is confined to the allocation of skilled workers for delivering the work activities in building superstructure construction using 6-day cycle. A practical case study on the superstructure construction of a 40storey housing project was conducted to illustrate and validate the method application of the proposed heuristic rules in determining a better scheme of work-zones.
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