INCORPORATING CONTEXT LEVEL VARIABLES TO IMPROVE OPERATION ANALYSIS IN STEEL FABRICATION SHOPS

Construction system modeling can enhance work performance by following the behaviors of a system. System behaviors may originate from physical aspects of a system, namely operation level variables, or from non-physical aspects of a system known as context level variables. However, construction system modelers usually focus on only one type of system variable (i.e., operation level or context level) which can lead to less accurate results. Hybrid modeling with System Dynamics (SD) and Discrete Event Simulation (DES) is one of the approaches that has been utilized to address this issue. In this research, an SD-DES hybrid model of a steel fabrication shop is developed, and the benefits of capturing context level variables together with operation level variables in the model are discussed.