Location-based management of construction projects: Part of a new typology for project scheduling methodologies

The domain of project scheduling has been treated as various disparate techniques, each competing to be the best method for effective planning and control of projects. Especially, there are many terms used to describe the family of construction scheduling methods which variously involve repetition, linear relationships, vertical or horizontal staging or in some other way map production units against time. This paper considers the underlying rationale behind those terms and proposes a new typology and terminology to encapsulate the entire family of scheduling methods and specifically to differentiate the family of production-oriented methodologies from the more common critical path methodologies. For this purpose the following terms are proposed: activity-based methodologies which may be divided into deterministic and probabilistic, and location-based methodologies which may be divided into unit production and location production. The paper then shows how location production in the location-based methodology involves focusing on locations as the unit of analysis and tasks as the unit of control as the framework for production management.