Distributed planning and coordination to support lean construction

Construction planning is a complex process that involves coordination between many project participants on- and off-site. As projects have been increasing in size and complexity, the number of participants involved in a single project has also increased. Numerous studies have suggested that the traditional project management tools, which are often used in a centralized top-down control environment, do not meet the production management requirements of today's projects. They have reported that the current communication tools do not adequately support the coordination efforts required to successfully deliver projects. This research presents a Distributed Planning and Control (DP&C) method based on a distributed control paradigm. The DP&C helps in improving production planning performance by adopting the Last Planner System (LPS) and thereby providing reliable communication channels in order support the creation of coordinated schedules at appropriate levels of detail. The DP&C method is supported by a tool called WorkMovePlan, which extends the Last Planner tools, WorkPlan and DePlan. WorkMovePlan uses synchronization technology for the collaborative creation of coordinated production plans based on explicit resource and space assignments. As proven during the conceptualization, development, and validation of WorkMovePlan, technology is no longer a barrier to implementing distributed planning and coordination thanks to wide acceptance of personal computers, wireless computing, Internet connectivity, and programming frameworks. The main barriers to implementation are (1) acknowledgement of uncertainty and approaches for managing it, (2) acceptance of the underlying, distributed control paradigm, and (3) willingness to break with traditional contractual arrangements, organizational structures, and common practices of the construction industry. These barriers suggest that many aspects of project management still need further investigation in order to achieve better alignment with production management. It is the author's belief that project management and production management tools need to work hand-in-hand in order to support the successful delivery of projects. It is expected that the DP&C method or similar methods will gain in acceptance in the construction industry as the shortcomings of the centralized control paradigm become increasingly evident and as Lean Construction continues to prove that it is a theoretically sound, though radically different alternative to how projects are delivered.