Modeling Labor Productivity in Construction Projects using Hybrid SD-DES Approach

Abstract

Labor productivity is one of the most significant factors in the evaluation of construction projects performance. Improvement of labor productivity is believed to have direct impact on outperformance of the project. This research argues about a hybrid SD-DES approach to model labor productivity considering the effects of both the context and operational level factors. The complex inter-related structure of different context factors affecting the labor productivity is modeled using system dynamics (SD) approach. Discrete event simulation (DES) is implemented to model the operational variables and their effects on labor productivity. Using the proposed hybrid SD-DES model, the labor productivity can be determined more precisely since the effects of both context and operational variables are taken into account. The proposed hybrid model is implemented in a real world case and the value of labor productivity is simulated considering the effects of both context and operational variables.