Planning during construction is a distributed process that involves many participants because needed information is usually not found within one party but is spread out among parties. As projects are becoming more dynamic and complex, and the involvement of specialty contractors is increasing, well-structured communication and coordination are more than ever essential for a project to succeed. Nevertheless, few existing planning tools provide the means to facilitate these processes. To fill this need, a new tool is presented here. This paper describes a WorkMovePlan, a database program that has been created to systematically develop lookahead plans and weekly work plans. Weekly work plans are detailed to include labor and equipment assignments as well as space use. Together with lookaheads, these plans are automatically shared so planners can detect potential conflicts and prevent expensive adjustments later on site. WorkMovePlan's distributed, bottom-up approach to planning, which complements the current centralized top-down approach, radically differs from practices supported by existing computing tools. We are currently working with general contractors and specialty contractors to identify the possibilities provided by the interactive coordination of distributed work plans in order to better coordinate work.
distributed planning, coordination, scheduling, planning, space scheduling, conflict detection, weekly work planning, lookahead planning, Last Planner, WorkMovePlan, WorkPlan
Choo, H. J. & Tommelein, I. D. 2000. WorkMovePlan: Database for Distributed Planningand Coordination, 8th Annual Conference of the International Group for Lean Construction , -. doi.org/ a >
Download: BibTeX | RIS Format