Content area
Full Text
Introduction
Construction planners add value for contracting organisations by ensuring that estimating and tendering are based on a robust understanding of methods, time and space required to carry out the tasks for each building contract and the corresponding risks involved ([24] Winch and Kelsey, 2005).
Traditionally the role of the planner at the pre-tender stage has been one of working in parallel with the estimating team to reconcile labour totals, plant totals, the duration of key activities, and the duration of site on-costs. Their output can be influential in winning tenders not based purely on financial criteria.
To undertake these tasks planners have in the past relied on methods such as bar charts and critical path planning to evaluate alternative options for the scheduling of construction activities. The critical path method (CPM) and bar charts are still widely employed by project teams as the main tool to express project schedules and co-ordinate the activities of project members ([12] Koo and Fischer, 2000). New technologies are currently emerging to augment these well-established tools. The most significant of these is virtual prototyping.
Virtual prototyping (VP) is a computer-aided design process concerned with the construction of digital product models ("virtual prototypes") and realistic graphical simulations that address the broad issues of physical layout, operational concept, functional specifications, and dynamics analysis under various operating environments ([20] Shen et al. , 2005; [25] Xiang et al. , 2004; [19] Pratt, 1995). Dedicated VP technology has been extensively and successfully applied to the automobile and aerospace fields ([6] Choi and Chan, 2004). However, the development and application of VP technology in the construction industry (i.e. construction process simulation) has, to date, been limited and predominantly adopted by leading architects for "signature" buildings. Model-based working is only just getting introduced in the construction sector to support design and project management, ([16] Li et al. , 2008; [21] Tulke and Hanff, 2007). This situation is now changing.
The Construction Virtual Prototyping Laboratory (CVPL) at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University has applied VP technology to the planning processes for several major construction projects in Hong Kong and mainland China. This work has included both pre-tender and post-tender planning. This paper describes the use of VP for pre-tender planning on the Ho Tung Lau project...