Weather-wise: working with the weather to improve construction productivity

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The influence of unforeseen, and not just necessarily extreme, weather conditions have adversely impacted Costain's construction productivity causing them significant project delays and economic losses. Costain's smart motorway projects, like most infrastructure projects, are predominantly carried out outdoors and involve multiple weather-sensitive activities. However, different activities are often susceptible to different combinations of weather variables and/or intensities. This has made the analysis of interaction between weather and construction productivity quite challenging so far.Nowadays, the UK government is committed to investing over £300 billion on an upgraded infrastructure system by 2021. Late projects delivery may have a significant economic impact at the country level. This, as missing the timely exploitation of this new infrastructure during a period of heavy investments can harm the country's economic growth and the financial stability of multiple stakeholders, including the government.The aim of this project is to tackle the challenge of harnessing the weather seasonal average variation from a construction-relevant perspective. The objective is to develop a holistic and quantitative Operational Research scheduling tool that anticipates the likely occurrence of specific combinations of weather events that prevent the satisfactory execution of frequent construction operations. Not extreme weather events, just sequential phenomena and/or combined non-extreme weather events, which condition over 95% of most contractors' daily operations.Particularly, the tool will implement a recent Stochastic Operational Research (SOR) model proposed by the investigators, which will allow Costain to optimise the project and activities start dates, their order of execution, even alternate locations across the UK when possible. All these with the aim of shortening the ongoing and future project durations and/or reduce their costs.Additionally, this project will benefit other construction stakeholders such as public and private project owners. These will benefit from infrastructure projects put in service on time, with more efficient and weather-aware maintenance approaches, while significantly reducing the amount of the frequent weather-related claims.Regarding deliverables and outputs, the first stage of the project will consist of extending the investigators' SOR model to include smart motorway frequent construction activities. The second stage will involve developing a computer application that can create project schedules linking the former activities to specific (predefined and customisable) combinations of weather variables they are sensitive to. This computer application will implement a set of recent investigators' sine wave regression expressions linking historical weather events probability with the geographical coordinates and day of the year when construction activities can be performed. The third stage will involve the application submitting the initial project schedule to multiple artificially-generated years whose weather will collectively resemble the climatology of the region. In each of those years, the software will calculate the delays each project activity will suffer because of adverse weather. Finally, the computer application will estimate the overall shortest project total duration and the optimum activities order and start dates.Previous experiments with the current SOR model in building construction have shown that implementing this model at an early stage of a construction project can shorten the project duration by at least 10% (on average), reduce the indirect and overhead costs proportionally and ultimately improve productivity rates. Similar or higher figures are expected for future contractors' infrastructure projects.Expected dur.: 12 months. Total cost (at 80%FEC): £131,430.90Keywords: Weather-wise, construction, scheduling, optimisation, Costain, smart motorways