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Sven Bertelsen
The paper addresses the EGLC and IGLC communities as a proposal to put together the huge number of contributions on construction flow presented since the first meeting in 1993 into a flow model of the construction process and thereby reach a deeper understanding of its nature – a Construction Physics.
In doing so this presentation in itself does not present substantial new research, instead it presents new conceptual insights. Thus it should be seen as a research proposal to the EGLC and IGLC. In the true spirit of IGLC the authors are not in total agreement on all the details.
Background
Since the IGLC foundation researchers have seen the construction processes as a flow of work delivering value to the client (Ballard 1993; Koskela 1993). Over the years this understanding has grown in importance and its usefulness in a number of cases has been reported along with detailed studies of some of the flows. In the same period a general theory for the construction process has been developed (Koskela 2000) along with Last Planner as tool for managing the flow of work.
However, most of this research has been focused on the flow of work, i.e. logical sequence of tasks; even though some have studied the flow of materials and components, whereas the remaining flows that also feed the process (e.g. flow of crew, information or equipment) have been dealt with sparsely only. Therefore we feel that the time may has come for establishment of a more general flow model taking into consideration the nature of all the flows in a construction process and their respective interactions as well.
Objective
Briefly it can be stated that the objectives of the proposed study are:
• Deliverance of prior works – putting our knowledge together in a more general context
• Opening of new lines of thinking – based on the theory developed within IGLC
• Establishing a general flow model for the construction process and analyze the nature of the flows
• Set out a research agenda
• Evaluate the suitability of the flow management tools and principles used in construction management and doing a critical analysis
• Propose improvement to existing tools and develop and test new ones.