A framework for cold weather construction simulation

In cold regions, weather poses a great deal of uncertainty to construction projects carried out in the open. Actual project schedules could significantly deviate from the original plans. Management requires reliable plans and schedules to set project activity times and baseline schedules against which the project performance will be measured. Faced with winter weather uncertainty in cold regions, this task becomes quite challenging. Planners often depend on their personal experience and judgement to assess for cold weather effects in their estimates; these speculations often differ from one planner to the other. There is a need for a well-structured and consistent approach to account for the impact of cold weather on construction projects. In this thesis, a structured approach to quantify and include the weather impact on construction processes is presented, which takes into consideration the location and time of year the project is scheduled to take place. The approach depends on developing and testing a good weather generator capable of generating the weather parameters affecting the construction industry. The generated weather should be similar to the historical weather of the location in which the project is taking place, then quantifying their effect on the process productivity. A framework is proposed for developing the integrated process simulation models to account for the interaction between the weather and the construction process. To ensure the ability of the framework to model the impact of cold weather on different construction processes, the framework is tested by systematically applying it to two construction processes: High Density Poly-Ethylene (HDPE) pipeline installation and the tunnelling construction process. The framework proved successful in modelling the impact of cold weather on the tested construction processes, and has the potential to be applied to a variety of construction processes. To promote reusability and interoperability of the framework in future applications, the weather generator was redeveloped using High Level Architecture (HLA), which showed great potential and suitability for this work.