| Preconstruction planning in construction started when the contractors received thebidding invitation documents and continued after the bid was awarded throughmobilization to a point early in construction. It has become a complex task requiringsubstantial collaboration, with ad-hoc teams created to bring all the project resourcesinvolved together in a timely manner as “glue” linking design, fabrication,transportation, construction processes, to ensure a construction project was completedeffectively and efficiently. This combined with the iterative nature of the planningprocess, has challenged even the best companies in the industry. In current practice,preconstruction planning process is led by HVAC engineer for its complex. ThePlumbing-Heating-Cooling Contractors (PHCC) National Association highlighted theimportance of the pre-construction planning process and organised several conferencefor improving it.With the development of urbanization in China, urban complex hasbecome hot issues in the construction field,. The fast and efficient construction of urbancomplex engineering was very necessary. for all stakeholders, development company,the construction units concerned, final tenants, consumers and urban people werebenefit from fast and efficient construction. However, in term of this kind of complexbuildings with complex system, multi-functions collection., it was usually undertookwith much uncertainty, limited resources, limited cost, narrow space, and many otherlimited conditions to realize fast and efficient construction, the difficulties derived notonly from the complexity of the technology, but also from the more complexity of theplan. At present, even for the international first-class enterprise it was a huge challengeto undertake urban complex fast and efficiently.In fact, by visiting the domestic famous urban complex developers and theinternational famous developers,it was found that both of them failed to achieve theaim for expected period of developers. In order to improve the project development andthe construction planning, the planning department were used widely in practice.However, after comparing the survey result from five urban complex, It was found thatdue to a serious lack of the theory and method of plan, although a lot of human andmaterial resource were invested, the effect was not obvious. It was found that theplanning in these typical five urban complexes showed a significantly general character of "busy, disorder and invalid". Three major weaknesses in current practice wereidentified in the research:1)it was a common phenomenon in practice that existing plan equaled to using theplan software, equaled to the results of a bar chart.2) plan process was actually a series of decision activities with obvious iterativefeatures, in practice, planners never thought about the optimization of the decisionorder, the abuse of “estimates and guess” was wide, leading to the conditions of"plan can not catch up with the change"; plan was usually separated from execution.3) the phenomena in practice was very common that practical period was delayedgreatly.On the basis of reviewing previous work on plan theory and plan methodology,and the result of the survey of five urban complexes, it was revealed that information ofpreconstruction planning process was similar to variable of equations. This thesisestablished corresponding mathematics model according to different type of decisionmaking in real project(from simple to complex), compared and analized the solvingprocess of equations group and corresponding decision making process respectively.Thequality of preconstruction planning decisions was depends on two factors, one wascorrect sequence of decision making, the other was depends on accuracy andeffectiveness of information. A suitable dynamic planning process modelling methodsand technology was established to model dynamic information flow-IDEF0Vmodelling technology, the data was achieved by case study, research interview andgroup discussion for modelling the elements and information process of thepreconstruction planning process, a set of general preconstruction planning processmodel was established including subsystems of Preliminary Investigations andConstraints Analysis, Scope Planning and Package Control, Construction MethodsPlanning, Estimating and Scheduling, Construction Logistics, Evaluation andCo-ordination, Safety, Quality and Environmental Protection, Issuing Plan Documentsand Information etc.This generic model of preconstruction planning was subsequently validatedthrough three live urban complex projects which also involved the application andevaluation of dynamic and collaborative plan method to create project programmes. Thecase studies revealed a range of benefits focused around three main outcomes. Firstly,the generic preconstruction planning process model, helped to overcome the firstweakness of current practice by eliminating many subjective decisions. This was achieved by generically representing the221tasks involved and3650information flowsin the preconstruction planning process of any construction projects in a consistent,re-usable manner, and realized the automatic generation of the plan task list and logisticrelationship, greatly reduced the planner’s work, also greatly reduced missing tasksand missing key logical relationship. Secondly, through the optimization of the structurematrix mathematics algorithm and the fast computing power of computers, it couldeasily find out a optimal planning decisions sequence with the least uncertainty，helping to eliminate many subjective decisions and improve the executable capability.Thirdly, all these previously-made estimations were highlighted, enabling furthertracking and management, which greatly improve d the effect and efficiency of plan. Ingeneral, the result of this research has significant effect to improve the management ofpreconstruction plan process with obvious practical effect. The participants of projectsacknowledge that the principle，the theory and method were of great value, evenwanted to sign a long term consulting agreement with Chongqing University. |
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