Spatio-Temporal Progress Estimation for Highway Construction

Highway construction involves repetitive, sequential operations that make them vulnerable to time and cost overruns. In order to increase their chance of being completed on time and within budget, these projects need efficient resource scheduling methods. This study presents a new scheduling system for highway construction projects. Location data generated from GPS technology can be used to track movement patterns of resources as well as progress of the project. Spatio-temporal constraints are used to generate dynamic project schedules and to visualize actual and potential project schedules and progress. By comparing observed versus planned progress, the system can anticipate delays. This information, in turn, can allow managers to implement adjustments in a flexible way to achieve better efficiency than post-hoc adjustments possible with traditional approaches.