A fuzzy discrete event simulation framework for construction applications: Improving the simulation time advancement

Discrete event simulation (DES) has been widely used for scheduling and analysis of construction projects. Integration of DES with fuzzy logic enhances the capabilities of DES by capturing imprecise, subjective, and linguistically expressed knowledge in the simulation inputs using fuzzy numbers. However, available fuzzy discrete event simulation (FDES) methodologies have significant shortcomings in handling fuzzy ranking and updating of the simulation time. These limitations often result in the inaccurate estimation of the start and completion times for individual activities and the whole project. This paper presents a new approach for calculating the event times to increase the accuracy of simulation time estimation in FDES. The major contributions of this paper are in integrating DES with fuzzy logic to increase its applicability in the construction domain and increasing the accuracy of FDES results. The proposed FDES approach was implemented in a construction project scheduling example, which confirms the higher accuracy of the proposed methodology compared to existing FDES methodologies.