Abstract:
Currently, the competition in the real estate market forces the constructors to increase their productivity. Construction techniques are introduced to provide more efficiency of the real estate projects. The prefabrication construction is one of the popular techniques that have been applied to housing projects. However, it has its characteristics that need continuous flow of resource utilization and more working areas. The presently used scheduling techniques such as, Bar Chart, Line of Balance, and Daily Schedule, are not adequate to transfer the important information from the planners to site supervisors and operators. The lack of support information causes unrealistic schedules and difficulty to modify such schedules to be practical ones in the later stages of the project. The objective of this research is to develop a framework for scheduling prefabricated housing construction that reflects the practical operation and transfers planning information to the site supervisors and operators. This research includes literature review of the related work, analysis of the present operations, and development of a framework for scheduling prefabricated work. The validation of the framework is in terms of composition, format, the ability to solve the present problems, and the information transfer. From the research, it founds that a framework for scheduling prefabricated housing construction composes of five components; materials and tools, prefabricated members installation sequence, activity and sub-activity schedule, troubleshooting, and integration schedule. For activity and sub-activity schedule, it covers activity and sub-activity, schedule and duration, labor and machine requirements, construction method, activity cautions, working areas, and quality specifications. Information in this schedule should how in graphical or pictorial format, which and provide more understanding to operators. Moreover, the machines involved in sub-activity should be scheduled in hourly scale for the duration and starting time in order to provide more efficiency in machine management.