Browsing by Author "Mourgues, Claudio"

Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
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    Formalizing the information requirements for decision-making of field managers during indoor construction activities
    (2024) Pillajo, Ernesto; Mourgues, Claudio; Gonzalez, Vicente A.
    Purpose - Information technology provides important support for on-site decision-making of field personnel. Most literature focuses on the technological aspects of decision-support systems, without fully understanding the information required for effective decision-making. This study aimed to formalize decision-makers' requirements in terms of the major goals, decisions and information.Design/methodology/approach - The situation awareness (SA) approach was applied through the goal directed task analysis (GDTA) method, narrowing the scope to field managers' decision-making during indoor construction activities. This method was based on a series of interviews to define, revise and validate the decision-making requirements for the given scope.Findings - The study yielded 1,056 highly interrelated elements. The results indicate that the field manager's overall goal is to execute and handoff work within the established deadlines, with the required quality, maximizing profits, within a safe work environment. The overall goal construes into five main goals regarding work progress, quality, costs, safety and communication. These goals include subgoals, decisions, and the information necessary to attain them, depicted in diagrams.Practical implications - The findings allow enhancing the design of decision-support solutions by identifying information required for future developments and showing the interrelations between goals and information requirements that need to be addressed to present interfaces for effectively assisting on-site decision-making. Moreover, the results allow for the assessment of solutions regarding the sufficiency of information.Originality/value - This is the first effort to fully understand the information required by field managers for on-site decision-making during indoor construction activities.
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    Identifying waste in virtual design and construction practice from a Lean Thinking perspective: A meta-analysis of the literature
    (PONTIFICIA UNIV CATOLICA CHILE, ESCUELA CONSTRUCCION CIVIL, 2016) Mandujano, Maria G.; Alarcon, Luis F.; Kunz, John; Mourgues, Claudio
    In recent years, the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry has broadly expanded the use of Virtual Design and Construction (VDC), particularly Lean Construction methods, to deliver value to their customers. VDC includes the use of Production Management using Lean methods as an integral part of the defining theory and method, and multiple case studies have concluded that the greatest performance improvement is achieved by implementing both initiatives together. This paper reviews extensive literature of VDC and Lean Construction with the intent to show benefits in the application of Lean Construction in the actual practice of VDC and to provide examples of waste and opportunities for improvement in projects if Lean methods are applied. This study found that use of Lean methods can help to reduce waste within the VDC process, in the phase of information flow (process view). Specifically, our main finding from this study was that only five types of waste represent 80% of the referenced occurrence of waste in VDC processes, which suggests that if teams use Lean Methods and focus on elimination of these types of waste (i.e., motion (excess), inventory (excess), overproduction, waiting and employee knowledge (unused)), teams can improve VDC practices dramatically.
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    Impact of Machine-Failure Costs on Equipment Replacement Policies: Tunneling Company Case Study
    (ASCE-AMER SOC CIVIL ENGINEERS, 2012) Alarcon, Luis F.; Rodriguez, Andres; Mourgues, Claudio
    For those construction companies engaged in projects where production is controlled by equipment availability, with tunneling as maybe the most extreme example, equipment replacement policies affect not just the cost of a machine but have a decisive effect on overall project cost and achieved profit. Although equipment replacement models described in the literature suggest that the consequential costs of equipment failure are significant and should be considered in replacement decisions, most fail to explicitly include consequential costs or fail to provide methods to calculate the consequential cost in complex systems. This lack of consequential cost in a model seriously diminishes the effectiveness of a company's equipment replacement policies and the company's ability to earn a project. This work describes a case study that used simulation to quantify the consequential costs of equipment availability for a company engaged in tunnel-construction. The study includes the simulation of activities of the drill-and-blast method for five tunnel types. The simulation proved to be very valuable when seeking to evaluate consequential costs. The results indicate that consequential costs are very relevant to the replacement decision of the most expensive equipment. Also, the results show a significant effect of the consequential costs on the company's equipment replacement policies. Therefore, changes in existing policies to consider consequential costs have the potential of providing important future benefits for such companies. DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)CO.1943-7862.0000480. (C) 2012 American Society of Civil Engineers.
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    Impact of Using a Formalized Methodology for Conflict Detection Based on 4D-BIM
    (2024) Flores, Martin; Mourgues, Claudio
    In construction projects, when resources assigned to two or more simultaneous activities share the same workspace, they generate time-space conflicts associated with congestion, safety, and quality issues. The use of building information modeling (BIM) methodologies, particularly four-dimensional (4D) models, offers the possibility to facilitate the identification of these types of conflicts. Existing literature has proposed formal methods for conflict detection; however, these largely focus on automating computational analyses without providing a practical and useful procedure for planners. Moreover, previous research has not evaluated the impact of using formal conflict detection methodologies. To address these gaps, this study proposes and evaluates the use of a formal conflict detection methodology in workspaces based on 4D-BIM. The research methodology includes a first stage that develops and validates the formalized conflict detection methodology through a literature review and interviews with field professionals. The second stage quantifies the impact of using the proposed methodology through an experiment that compares the effectiveness and efficiency of a group of planners in detecting conflicts using 4D-BIM models with and without the proposed methodology. The results demonstrate that the formalized methodology enhances the planning process by increasing the detection of conflicts from 18% to 82%. Additionally, the formalized methodology reduces review time by 23% and enhances user experience. These findings contribute to improving the planning process by managing and reducing time-space conflicts in construction schedules. Consequently, the construction process will become more efficient by averting issues related to productivity, safety, and quality based on the identification of workspace conflicts. Last, the proposed methodology contributes to a better adoption of BIM by providing a structured procedure for using the 4D-BIM model to support planning processes.
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    Method to produce field instructions from product and process models for cast-in-place concrete operations
    (ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV, 2012) Mourgues, Claudio; Fischer, Martin; Kunz, John
    The state-of-practice method to produce good and formal work instructions for construction laborers takes time, is error prone and produces outcomes with inconsistent format and content. That is why contractors rely on verbal work instructions in spite of the field mistakes and inefficiencies that this poor communication produces. Our research addresses the underlying scientific problem of this practical quandary: the lack of a formal method that defines the steps and information needed to produce good work instructions from a company's best practices and a project's 3D product model.
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    Quantitative analysis of workflow, temporary structure usage, and productivity using 4D models
    (ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV, 2008) Jongeling, Rogier; Kim, Jonghoon; Fischer, Martin; Mourgues, Claudio; Olofsson, Thomas
    This paper presents time-space analyses of construction operations supported by quantitative information extracted from 4D CAD models. The application of 4D models is a promising approach to help introduce construction innovations and to evaluate construction alternatives. Current analyses of 4D models are mainly visual and provide project stakeholders with a clear, but limited, insight of construction planning information. This practice does not take advantage of the quantitative data contained in 4D models. We use two 4D models of an industry test case to illustrate how to analyze, compare, and present 4D content quantitatively (i.e., workspace areas, work locations, and distances between concurrent activities). This paper shows how different types of 4D content can be extracted from 4D models to support 4D-content-based analyses and novel presentation of construction planning information. We suggest further research aimed at formalizing the contents in 4D models to enable comparative quantitative analyses of construction planning alternatives. Formalized 4D content can enable the development of reasoning mechanisms that automate 4D-model-based analyses and provide the data content for presentations of construction planning information. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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    Reference Virtual Design Team (VDT) probabilities to Design Construction Project Organizations
    (2015) Concha, Marcelo; Fernando Alarcon, Luis; Mourgues, Claudio
    This paper reports the results obtained from five virtual models of construction project organizations developed using the Virtual Design Team (VDT) method. The results were compared with the real project organization performance in each case and their probabilities inputs were calibrated to obtain benchmark reference inputs for future projects. The models were validated comparing their predictions with real results obtained in the projects and the predicted behavior of the organizations was subjected to the assessment and approval of technical experts of the companies in the study. The calibrated models obtained represent reality within appropriate margins given the variable nature of the problem, being able to predict the performance of projects with results generally less than 5% difference between the real performance and modeling results, achieving probabilities close to those from literature and well received by companies in the structured interview, with over 70% approval in the predicted factors covered. These results contribute to expand the uses of VDT methodology and to adapt this methodology to local companies, which enables to model organizations at the planning and design phase, achieving improvements in terms of cost, schedule and quality risks.
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    Value assessment in the traditional housing design: Case studies applying a value analysis model
    (2023) Gimenez, Zulay; Mourgues, Claudio; Alarcon Cardenas, Luis Fernando; Mesa, Harrison; Pellicer, Eugenio