A NESTING APPROACH IN DISCRETE EVENT SIMULATION FOR INTEGRATING CONSTRUCTION OPERATION AND SCHEDULE MODELS

Simulation applications for analyzing the productivity of construction operations at operation level and project schedules at project level are crucial methods in project management. The application at two different levels should be very tightly linked to each other in practice. However, appropriate integration at the levels is not achieved in that existing systems do not support to integrate operation models into a schedule model. This paper presents a new approach named to Discrete Event Simulation-Nesting modeling approach, which supports not only productivity analysis at operation level but also schedule management at a project level. The system developed by the authors allows creating operation models at the operation level, maintaining them in operation model library, executing sensitivity analysis to find the behaviors of the operation models when different combination of resources are used as existing DES systems do. On top of the conventional functions, the new system facilitates to find the optimum solution of resource combinations which satisfy the user's interest by computing the hourly productivity and the hourly cost of the operation. By drag-and-dropping an operation model kept in the operation model library, the operation models are integrated into an activity of the schedule model. When a complete schedule model is established by nesting operation models into the schedule model, stochastic simulation based scheduling is executed. A case study is presented to demonstrate the new simulation system and verify the validity of the system.