ABSTRACT
Indian Roads Congress stipulates requirement of planning the bridge by Critical Path Method. CPM though well developed and studied over the last half a century has limited suitability in various situations encountered in scheduling of work like Multi Span Bridge
The scheduling problem posed by multi span bridge has the characteristics of problem posed by repetitive unit construction however the repetitive units in this case of bridge may vary greatly in work from one unit to the other. The problem of repeated scheduling activities is not effectively addressed by CPM. When two activities are independent of each other CPM is practically incapable of scheduling the activities logically. Additional artificial constraints are required to schedule the activities which have constant production rate.
Line of Balance and Linear Scheduling Method are well suited for activities with constant production rate, however these are not effective in addressing the problems where large number of activities with different production rate are dependent on each other as compared to CPM/PERT. Also these do not think of units with minor differences.
A scheduling methodology developed for repetitive projects known as RSM has potential for using precedence diagram for repetitive projects attempting to provide advantages of both Line of Balance and CPM techniques. By introducing a concept of control points RSM takes care of both resource continuity constraint as well technical constraint. The use of this method for repetitive portion of multi span bridge can be looked into to provide an easier and efficient scheduling method for construction of multi span bridge.
A study has been made by scheduling work packages of a sixteen span bridge using Repetitive scheduling method to find out the effectiveness of RSM and comparing with CPM and LoB. The method is more effective compared to CPM and LOB in scheduling the work packages and looks promising for use in different...