Visual and Virtual Production Management System for Proactive Project Controls

Abstract

Current construction still suffers from significant schedule delays and budget overruns due to inefficient and retroactive project controls programs. This paper developed a visual and virtual project control system that proactively promotes team-based planning and real-time communication of progress and schedule risk. The system benefits from the growth of visual data on construction sites and the increasing maturity level of building information modeling (BIM), to map the current state of production in 3D and expose waste. By modeling production trends, reliability in the future state of production is forecasted to highlight potential delay issues in a location-driven scheme. A visual 3D interface supports collaborative decision-making to eliminate root causes of waste, enables pull flows between people and information, decentralizes work tracking, and facilitates in-process quality control and hand-overs among contractors. This system was implemented on two projects to validate the underlying algorithms. Results show that the system’s functional aspects improve transparency, accountability, and traceability in project execution, and streamline communications between the field and the office. Specifically, 30% PPC increase and four weeks project completion date advance have been observed. Limitations such as resistance to workflow changes could be further improved in the future through early system introduction.