A study of input and output field quantification in heavy civil construction
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- When I began writing this thesis, it was two years after I had completed my time as a Laborer. Many of my ideas formed during my time as a field engineer at the Granite Heavy Construction Division when I was only a year out of the Laborers. The early drafts of this thesis read like it was written by someone that had never written more than three pages at any one time -- and nobody had ever read those three pages and provided feedback. After numerous revisions, while I may have improved the writing style I began to realize that the improvement is at the cost of losing the core knowledge the thesis contains. So, for the most part, this thesis contains an understanding of construction from the mind of a laborer. In this thesis, I convey the methods of measuring the status of a construction project. In the case of this thesis, I focus on the vertically integrated project style typical of heavy construction projects though the methods I present are general to other construction types such as buildings. The basic block of construction is the activity. The difference between two activity status points is equal to the project progress. The progress is a fundamental metric of success that is as old as the construction profession. Without knowing the progress of activities, it is not possible to predict the expected sequence and duration of future activities. This means it is not possible to assemble the activity aspects of workspace, labor, material, and equipment to converge at the right time and place to achieve a safe activity that has a low risk of neither damaging the environment nor impacting the surrounding community. The methodology I used as to study the methods of measuring status is a mixed approach. At the core, I used an ethnography to form my understanding from a first person perspective. I then compared my firsthand knowledge with publications to fill the gaps in my knowledge. The limitation is the small observation sample characteristic of the ethnography. I had remaining observations that I had not found in the published knowledge. To resolve these I used a questionnaire survey and interviews of experts to understand the relation of these outliers. I found that activity progress status is formed by two components -- these are the status and the context of the activity. The two are inseparable. Within those two topics, I found numerous approaches of estimating and measuring status and context. Further, I found sources of errors in the status and context measurements. The significance of my findings is rooted in first the lack of an existing unified source of this knowledge and second I provide a complete knowledge within the domain of heavy construction, particularly for the vertically integrated project organization.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2015 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Peterson, Forest Olaf |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. |
| Advisor | Fischer, Martin, 1960 July 11- |
| Thesis advisor | Fischer, Martin, 1960 July 11- |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Forest Olaf Peterson. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Engineering)--Stanford University, 2015. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2015 by Forest Olaf Peterson
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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