Schedule Estimates for Preconstruction Activities of Highway Projects-Reviewof The Literature

bstract: Among the multiple causes of project success in the construction of big projects (such as highway projects), punctually deliveringpreconstruction activities is increasingly recognized as a important cause that has not received adequate attention. In this research, after providingan introduction about the different phases and activities in a construction project, the reasons behind the importance of preconstruction activitiesare briefly summarized. Scheduling of these types of activities is complex in nature mostly because of the unclear path toward delivering them;therefore, inaccurate scheduling of them is common. Since it is a very demanding and difficult responsibility to organize the literature efficiently,the literature is classified into five different groups to accelerate this effort. These groups are environmental clearance, design, right-of-wayacquisition, utility adjustment, and finally advertising and letting. In this research, these categories and their definitions are provided in detail. Afterconducting a comprehensive literature review, the results of this study show that there is a lack of a quantitative model for predicting schedulesassociated with various preconstruction activities. Beside many other causes behind this need, the main reason is that the approach of most of theprevious studies was qualitative and the few studies that conducted a quantitative research on historical data, had a small sample size.