Measuring and Tracking Externalized Work to Support Industrialized Construction

Abstract

The same principles that have made other skilled-trade-based industries more efficient are being deployed in construction through Industrialization, which requires understanding skilled trade work and segregating/externalizing the work from the jobsite. The construction industry still relies heavily on skilled trades and their tacit knowledge, while most of the information available at the points of installation is not passed on. A significant increase of work externalization requires a measuring and tracking method that can: 1) tap into this tacit knowledge as the basis for work planning and control; and 2) understand, quantify, and minimize the manipulation effort done onsite for the prefabricated assemblies. As such, this paper presents a planning and control framework for industrialized construction operations that integrates information entropy and the novel concept of work manipulations to monitor and measure the expected performance outcomes, in a more sophisticated approach beyond measuring äóìhoursäó� and äóìquantitiesäó� of the work. The development of the proposed framework is based on the analysis of a set of case studies that illustrate the impact of information predictability manipulation strategies on construction prefabrication decisions.