Temporal perspectives in construction simulation modeling

Abstract

Temporal perspectives play a vital role in shaping narratives. Such perspectives include models of time that support the practice of construction management. Although formal representations of time are rarely noticed, they strongly influence the variables and relationships that can be encoded in process models. The objective of this paper is to illustrate the distinct ways in which the time can be formalized and how they impact the understanding of project performance and productivity. It explores existing and new temporal representations on how they contribute to improving reasoning capabilities in construction processes. Existing models differ by whether they use time points or intervals to represent activities (e.g. activity-on-node networks versus Gantt bar charts) and how clearly they communicate changes during execution. While traditional approaches exhibit shortcomings, singularity functions have significant potential for further development and could benefit from conceptual integration with situational simulation toward a powerful and integrated temporal modeling scheme.