INTRODUCTION
Highway construction scheduling and planning is a complex process. For any person involved in Highway construction project, the intimate knowledge of construction methods, materials, equipment, and historical production rates is a very important factor. My personal knowledge and experience has helped me in planning several projects for construction of highways. I have realized that good scheduling of projects takes into account the economies that can be realized by conducting multiple activities concurrently. Planning a highway project must take into account the impact of weather, labor relations, subcontractor qualifications and productivity, material availability, and a host of other factors.
Crucial to the successful outcome of any major highway construction and reconstruction projects is the ability to accurately plan, predict and control the construction process. Budget control, resource allocation and consequential impacts are some of the important factors that a scheduler needs to keep in mind while planning a highway construction project. Today, highway constructors need sophisticated project management tools to achieve their project goals on time. Project scheduling has tremendously helped constructors building construction for the past 20 to 30 years. However, traditional scheduling techniques used by buildings contractors cannot be applied to highway construction as the activities involved in highway construction are fundamentally different than those typically found on a building project.
My personal experience in dealing with several highway projects in the past has revealed that typical highway construction/rehabilitation projects should be linear activities. This research work shows that current...
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Six flags is a company that has 29 theme parks with a Chief Corporate Engineer, Larry Chickola. Larry overseas all the projects for the parks and has teams of engineers that help take care of technical issues and building and construction. All six flags projects have a comprehensive plan for completing the work in a timely fashion. They have written statements as to what work is to be done and dated schedules for completion. They also have to include tasks and sub tasks all being figured into the budget. There is a “work package,” which is a group of activities assigned to break down each task and sub task to fit these into manageable quotas. They feel this is the key to managing logistics.
Many mass construction projects in the history of the United States have had a major impact on the economy and culture; however, not many of these have had as large as an impact as the Interstate Highway Act of 1956. The Interstate Highway Act revolutionized the way that we think about highways today. The act created an extremely easy mode of transportation for people across the country. Not only was the Interstate Highway Act extremely helpful in making rural and urban transportation for normal people, but it also helped commercial businesses in increasing sales across the country. These businesses were now able to transport their goods cheaper and faster. The Interstate Highway Act was tremendously beneficial in regards to its economic, social, and cultural significance. The legislation was significant economically in the way that it promoted business and cut travel costs, it was significant socially in the way that it allowed people to see friends and family even if they did not live close, and it was significant culturally in the way that it allowed people to move out to the country for low costs in order to live a happier life.
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Time-phased project work is the basis for project cost control. Work package duration is used to develop the project network. Further, the time-phased budgets for work packages are timetabled to establish fiscal measures for each phase throughout the project. The time-phased budgets are to emulate the real cash needs of the budget, which will be used for project cost control. This information is useful to estimate cash outflows. The project manager's attention is on when the costs are to occur, when the budgeted cost is earned, and when the actual cost materializes. This information is made up to measure project schedule and cost variances (Gray & Larson, 2005). The following are typical types of costs found in a project:
When Mr. Kay calculated the financial ratios, he realized that the debt ratio of Huggy Bear Toys was different than the industry average. Therefore, he wants to know what the growth rate of the company would be if the debt ratio of Huggy Bear Toys were equal to the debt ratio of the industry (45%). To be able to calculate that growth rate, you need to find the new income statement and balance sheet items by taking into account the information provided below. If no information is given about an income statement or balance sheet item, assume that this item is not going to change.
Kezner, H. Project Management: A Systems Approach to Planning, Scheduling, and Controlling. 6th. New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc, 1998. Print.
A project of the magnitude of the Dallas Cowboy's Stadium would have anyone excited and anxious to see it begin. As excited as they may have been, the project manager seemed very well prepared and used various tools and processes to have a plan in place and complete the project. One of the benefits of planning is that it improves efficiency (Wysocki, R., P. 145). "By doing tasks concurrently, you shorten the duration of the project" (Wysocki, R., p. 145). Many times throughout the project a lot of the work was done simultaneously. For example, in the course of the roof construction, the project manager developed a plan that included having an air space coordinator to have 17 cranes work together. Additionally, “at peak construction, nearly
Since the dawn of mankind, humans have always held an instinctual desire to travel. There is a route to any destination, and in this day and age, these routes are much faster due to the implementation of interstate systems. These long, straight highway roads provide America’s citizens a place to drive their cars at higher speeds, thus allowing us to reach our destination much faster than taking standard roads. When Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, he set into motion one of the largest construction projects in U.S. history, and introduced an invention that would completely change America’s system of travel for decades to come.
Labor productivity is a major factor on a construction project to stay within the budget and complete on time. Work sampling system is a simple technique to use in management of cost, site resources, time and labor, but it is only an indirect measurement of actual productivity. In a construction projects waste can rise at any phase of the construction development from the start, doing the design phase, and throughout the operation of the construction of the building. In recent years, labor productivity and waste in the construction industry has been one of the major focus of numerous study of construction projects worldwide. Generally, most construction company recognize waste as a very high level of existent in the construction industry.
M. K. Trivedi and Sapan Namdev [4] Over a year many research had solved construction optimization problems. The techniques used by them varied in nature between mathematical techniques or conventional techniques to heuristic techniques. Over a past 20 years researchers had emphasized on Evolutionary Algorithms (EA) to solve construction optimization problems. Different Evolutionary Algorithms techniques such as Genetic Algorithm (GA), Ant colony method etc, had been used by many researchers to optimize the time-cost of a construction project. In this paper a detailed literature review of different approaches used by researchers to optimize the time-cost of a construction project is going to be
The idea of worker performance, or “human engineering” is to have construction site planning, coordination and scheduling working as smoothly as possible to make sure one can meet a deadline without any resistance. Now as one works on a construction site, there will be unplanned incidents that will make the job more difficult. These can include weather conditions, site conditions, and worker motivation. A projects success depends on high level worker performance to meet fast approaching deadlines.
The construction industry is one of the substrates of the domestic economy for most countries. The construction industry is playing an important role in developing the economic and status of the country. The construction process itself involved with unexpected factors. Therefore, an efficient and successful construction project is with a statement by completion of the project on time, with the given budget and to the determination quality. The construction industry have an unparalleled and own features and qualities that makes it different from other industries. The construction are unparalleled, future in the nature of construction and it involves extraordinary difference of professions,
Different building materials will be brought in at different times in the project (Sadeghpour & Andayesh 2015). Once the project is started, materials will be constantly coming in and being stored on site before use. there must be room for these new materials to come in when they are needed. Equipment will be needed at certain points in a project, and there must be space for the equipment to operate on location. If there is not enough room to operate the equipment, materials can be damaged causing progress to slow down and possibly stop completely. Knowing the timeline of a project will greatly improve the effectiveness of the preplanned site
The development of every nation hinges on the effectiveness of their transportation systems. Movement of goods, services and people to and from locations is made possible by transportation systems. The importance of effective transportation systems cannot be over-emphasized. Many countries face transportation problems and my country Ghana is no exception. A trip of about 30 minutes usually takes about an hour or more due to traffic jams. This is seriously impacting productivity and has become a topical issue in the country. The situation is the same in Uganda where I currently work. To this end, Transportation Engineers are needed to design roads/ highways that will stand the test of time, plan effective traffic management systems to reduce