Large-scale infrastructure planning for optimised construction

Challenge

Nationally significant infrastructure projects are formed of consortiums with complex supply chains and now rely upon an increasing use of novel engineering, planning and logistics techniques to achieve their stated ambitions. Moving from the conceptual design stage into front-end engineering design and development consent orders (DCOs) can be challenging with a significant number of unknowns that compound into an unacceptable risk profile.

There are vast interdependencies within project build schedules meaning that even small extensions or delays in a single part of the project can propagate into a significant overall delay. Uncertainty in these plans needs to be clearly understood and documented to ensure that overall budgets can be justified and the build sequence clearly defined to minimise timeframes and disruption.

Evidencing that enough optioneering, due diligence and trade-off studies have been completed at the pre-application and pre-examination stages can save significant time during consenting and supports budgetary assurance.

Solution

Working with a Tier 1 construction and civil engineering firm, we developed novel simulation techniques to address this challenge. Using full parameterised models, developed to scale to HPC-level, millions of potential scheduling options were evaluated to understand the sensitivity in each.

The approach combines the build schedules and supply chains from all of the individual project partners into a single model, enabling transient process simulations to be performed across the full network. Design trade-offs and ‘what-if’ scenarios can be assessed for a given time period (day/week/month) to evaluate the viability of a given sequence of events allowing due diligence to be performed on the design before resources are committed.

This approach has enabled a greater degree of coordination between partners to ensure resources are fully utilised and space on construction sites allocated accordingly.

Impact

Through this approach, planners have added an additional level of governance to be able to amend the activity schedule and plan more efficiently.
Planners can rapidly evaluate changes to the plan to assess:

• Given all the build activity that needs to be completed within a period, are there enough resources available to achieve the goal?
• If yes, which scheduling option of the thousands available gives the most minimum risk profile as well as the best use of resources?
• How resilient is the activity schedule to delays, disruption, uncertainty and additional requirements?
• How do resource constraints affect planned work? How can the long-term plan be amended to accommodate for delays?