Integrated evaluation of cost, schedule and emission performance on rock-filled concrete dam construction operation using discrete event simulation

Massive concrete dam projects will be conducted in the next ten years to respond to the increasing demand for clean energy and water resources in developing countries. With more attention paid to environmental issues, there is an increasing need to develop a methodology for reliably predicting the integrated performance of cost, schedule and emission factors in the planning stage. In this paper, we propose a methodology for using discrete event simulation (DES) for dam construction processes to enhance the performance dynamically. A case study is conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the DES model, which is validated by the actual cumulative progress on the construction site. The results indicate that the cost, schedule and emission performance are highly interactively correlated when using RFC in dam projects. The promoted methodology could help construction managers compare the integrated performance of different options in RFC dam constructions.