Time-Cost Trade-off (TCT) Analysis based Application Framework for Safety Centric Construction Acceleration Planning

• Author / Creator

  Mahdavian, Samin

• The purpose of using a Time-Cost Trade-off (TCT) analysis is to account for foreseeable project safety concerns and hazards, speed up activity times, and reduce the overall duration of the project while keeping project cost within a certain budget limit. This type of acceleration planning is common practice in the construction industry and needs to ensure safety in activity execution and take into account multiple dynamic variables, such as changes in crews and work space settings, new hazards and constraints with implications on workers’ occupational health and safety. Mitigation measures needs to be taken in acceleration planning to address additional safety constraints, resulting in an inevitable increase on project cost. The application framework established in this thesis can be used specifically for construction activity acceleration planning in order to consider the cost, safety, and time aspects of a project.

  This research proposes an application framework for safety centric construction acceleration planning by extending the established TCT analysis in project management. Specifically, the proposed framework can be utilized by project managers to (1) identify relevant factors that shape accidents on typical construction activities; (2) adhere to rules and best practices for schedule acceleration and account for associated costs; and (3) analytically select a subset of activities from the project to shorten activity times so as to minimize project cost in realization of a given target project duration without compromising safety.

  The proposed methodology starts by setting all the activities at the shortest “crash”

  duration according to the planned “crash” scenario. First, the shortest achievable duration of the project is determined by utilizing the critical path method to analyze the project network model. Then, the goal is to keep the project duration resulting from CPM but lower the project cost to a minimum subject to activity time being adjusted to the best position between crash and normal scenarios along with fixing the associated activity cost, under the same precedence constraints in the project.

  To materialize the research objectives, a literature review was performed to identify the major factors related to safety management on construction projects and assess the state of art on TCT analytical methods for project management. The proposed framework was then formed by integrating the appropriate knowledge and technique. Two specific project case studies were conducted to demonstrate applications and benefits in terms of how to plan critical activity acceleration on construction projects. In particular, relevant factors that shape accidents on typical construction activities were identified, while costs in connection with implementing safety measures and adhering to rules and best practices for schedule acceleration were accounted for. Additionally, a 100-acitivty project case study was conducted to contrast the current project scheduling practice (P6 scheduling) against the proposed framework in terms of analytically selecting a subset of activities from the project to shorten activity times so as to minimize project cost in realization of target project duration.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Safety Planning
  • Construction Management

• Graduation date

  Fall 2021

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Science

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-x8ht-ng08

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.