Modeling highway construction tasks to determine project duration

This study serves three purposes that are relevant to highway construction operations. The first purpose is to model highway construction to determine task duration for the purpose of scheduling. Although scheduling requires a proper determination of task duration and productivity, productivity is difficult to determine because of the collective effect of many variables, such as weather, site conditions, method of construction, equipment, labor, the arrival of materials, and management decisions. The Average and Distribution Model of Productivity (ADMP) combines the effects of many variables on the productivity of a daily highway construction task and measures these effects with a 95% confidence level of task completion. This study considered nine major highway construction tasks, and data were collected on up to 12 data sets for each task. The data were mainly collected on the cycle times of the production units, the cycle times of the processors, the allocation of resources, and the occurrences of delay.

The second purpose of this study is to use the ADMP and efficiency analysis to evaluate the validity of claims for time-related disputes in highway construction projects. Management problems and poor resource allocation are the cause of most delays on the part of the contractor. Efficiency analysis is a useful tool for evaluating productivity and claims for highway construction projects.

The third purpose of this study is to calculate the cost of a task based on observed site conditions and to define the influence of task duration on cost. The results of this study showed that duration significantly influences the cost of equipment and labor, but insignificantly affects the cost of materials.

The determination of task duration and productivity is essential for project scheduling, estimating the cost of a project, and evaluating claims. The experience based method has shown significant shortcomings in determining task duration properly. The ADMP is an excellent method for evaluating, determining, and predicting task duration and evaluating cost estimates and claims in highway construction. The simplicity of combining the effects of the many variables that influence highway construction is the most important contribution of this method.