Summary: |
A leading, international, engineering and construction company has carried outefforts to engage a new tool set and work process. Four-Dimensional Planning andScheduling (4D-PS) is the new work process that aims toward better, more efficientplanning and execution of large construction projects. This paper describes thecase history and forecasts how this revitalized technique may ultimately impact theconstruction industry. Despite academic and practitioners' research anddevelopment efforts to leverage from Information Technology (IT) in construction,the industry at large, being generally conservative, has adhered to the values ofpredictability and existing methods to minimize risk. 4D technology has struggledto find its way into mainstream construction practice for several years, and justrecently it has been shown that commercially available software and hardware canbe applied effectively toward this end, greatly reducing investment risk. Theserelatively new tools promise new impetus to the use of 4D-PS in the constructionindustry. This paper describes how 4D-PS was applied on a major constructionproject, giving rise to a new work process that proved to be productive and costeffective. Emphasis is made on the fact that those expected to use such technologymust have the necessary training and, conversely, near-future versions ofcomputerized tools can be made more intuitive for more widespread use. The useof such techniques will necessarily draw engineering/design and constructionentities closer together, essentially improving coordination among them. |