Enhancing Construction Process Employing Lean Principles and Discrete Event Simulation

Traditional push-based planning systems often result in several types of waste due to mainly improper distribution of resources. Waste may have several adverse effects on a project, including the increases in cost, duration, and emission. Thus, the practitioners and researchers have provided various lean production tools such as pull concept, implementation of supermarket concepts, and standardization to reduce waste and to enhance the execution process. Although researchers have attempted to transfer some lean manufacturing principles to the construction industry in the last two decades, the employment of some lean concepts (e.g., pull, standardization) in the construction has been challenging. On the other hand, employing a lean concept before the construction phase can be beneficial in identifying the waste of execution process and subsequently reducing time and cost the project. To evaluate the performance of lean concept scenarios before the construction phase, it seems necessary to employ a promising tool that can anticipate the various aspects of the execution process including resource utilization, time, cost, and process waste. Many researchers demonstrated the capability of Discrete Event Simulation (DES) to evaluate the implementation of optimal alternatives in the executive process planning. The traditional concept of lean manufacturing is borrowed in the current study to identify some sorts of wastes and existing bottlenecks over the executive steps of a construction process. However, due to difficulties in applying lean manufacturing on construction projects, this study proposes a simulation-based framework to evaluate various types of waste in the current situation before the commerce of the construction phase to enhance the future state in the construction industry. Such a hybrid framework integrating DES with lean concepts has been rarely used in the current and future planning phase of construction projects to evaluate the existing plan. The proposed approach is applied successfully to an actual construction case study in Tehran, Iran.