Advancing project planning and control techniques to improve productivity and competitiveness in industrial construction engineering and management

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Planning and control of industrial construction and maintenance projects is especially challenging, because it must take into consideration multiple work fronts, the large size of the workforce, the concentrated and congested work areas, and the fixed dates for commissioning and starting up production. Over a time span of five years and in collaboration with four industrial construction companies in Alberta, this CRD grant will address various facets of planning and control of industrial construction and maintenance projects, including research and development of advanced techniques for (1) scheduling and logistics simulation, (2) augmented reality and mixed reality modeling, (3) equipment kinematics modeling plus multisite allocation scheduling, and (4) intelligent wireless sensor networks calibrated by artificial neural networks for precise resource tracking and positioning. The proposed CRD will train eight HQPs, including four PhD students and four Master's students. With respect to prototyping integrated systems, the proposed CRD will be focused on addressing issues related to large-scale, reusable modeling with standardized development and integration of various simulation methods. In particular, the CRD will capitalize on the recent development of the COSYE framework from the Co-I's NSERC/Alberta IRC program, which is a high level architecture (HLA) based simulation environment, to integrate different software and information technologies and streamline the development of large-scale, collaborative or integrated models in construction engineering. This CRD project will enhance the competitiveness of the four partner companies and the Alberta construction industry at large through a concerted R & D effort into advancing state-of-the-art methods for project planning and control. In the longer term, this research will contribute to making the industrial sector of the Canadian construction industry competitive globally. We envision in the foreseeable future, in the domain of industrial construction engineering and management, the world will turn to Canada in search of excellence in research and education as well as best practices.