Derek E Graham

estimators and schedulers. This is an expected reflection of the industries and their inversely valued investment in technology, with the design industry at the head of the class, and builders stuck in analog." I thought "what better time than now for a reassessment of AI CPM Construction Scheduling," given the level of 'smoke buildup,' or AI hype currently trending digital media. As, yet no AI CPM Construction scheduling platform has made any noticeable dent in the market share-assuming there is one. According to IBIS World:

The impact schedule can represent delays, disruptions, or both. It is incumbent on the claims preparer to make that distinction. An impact schedule is predicated on a series or succession of events that are expected to increase overall duration or the critical path. In some cases the impact schedule reflects a reduction in overall duration. Such a document may accompany a claim for early completion, which may be compensable.

The key to a successful productivity loss disruption claim is an accurate report and graphic representation of a meticulous ​ Time Impact Analysis (TIA). In Primavera 6, the TIA may be represented with the baseline bar, and actual-bar, on the same chart. Another way of representing a productivity loss is using the Measured Mile. However; these charts are only window dressing to complement a well researched and documented productivity claim. But even with the Measured Mile approach, productivity loss is a slippery-slope. The reason why, is the same reason that stymies researchers of productivity loss: the approach depends on the industry, or context. For example, an assembly line process and individual workers can be easily monitored-even for things like downtime. If productivity loss becomes evident, it will be easier to isolate by separating its constituents and measuring their productivity rates against past performance. The same can hardly be said for the building industry. That's not so much owing to a paucity of available trade specific research​ , as it is to difficulty in obtaining ​ valid data​. When estimating productivity for a resource driven CPM schedule, rates of production are entered into the resource activity. Most of that resource is on-task, but the rest of the time is found in preparatory or downtime activities. When actual resources perform worse than the baseline assignment-you get slip, or productivity loss.

Not long ago, I posted a feature on AI-centric project delivery eventually supplanting traditional HI means and methods project of general requirements and general conditions, with semi-automated AI engines, assisted by human interfaces (HI). Blockchain project delivery will be the infrastructure of AI-centric construction management. This disruption will be mainstreamed into peer industries long before it hits the construction management landscape, but sooner than one might think.

Despite the zen simplicity of ‘time + budget,’ venture capitalists, executive administrators, Ivy League CFOs, MBA appointees, and politico bureaucrats who control the fate of megaprojects prefer to obfuscate, rather than illuminate, bifurcate and equivocate, facts; as far away from simple answers as possible. This practice is known as ‘strategic misrepresentation,’ or more familarly: ‘bull-shit,’ and is well documented in Flyvbjerg, et al.

“Megaprojects of the past seem to wallow in the complacency of their own clandestine organization that was seldom held to account.

Invariably, megaproject budget and time constraints become so distended of their original design and purpose, that they inevitably defy intelligibility, and worse: inscrutability. AI-centric Megaproject-controls would democratize the process by making readily available information to public and third-party oversight professionals, whose rights to access would be unprivileged.

Traditional construction project delivery performance suffers from long and well publicized negative global productivity lags: negative compared to the industry 20 years ago, and negative compared to other industries. This negative productivity is associated with both budget shortfalls and turnaround delays.  Infamous megaprojects suffer from these same shortcomings to exponential degrees.

Data hunting/gathering is a natural instinct, just as our ancestors hunted and gathered sustenance. The data is used to help deterministically predict outcomes - in short - relying only on data, misses the forest for the trees. It is sent along to some clueless executive to disseminate, and make decisive action. However, that cycle continues to yield inconsistent, and poor results, which makes the process ripe for disruption by AI interfaces.

AI could take over entire data-driven project management and project control platforms, controlling all notifications, confirmations, documentation, permitting, drawings, schedules, estimates, specifications, etc., once they have been uploaded to its server, obviating gazillion ...

Artificial Intelligence has both unlimited potential and limitations in the process of developing complex CPM construction schedules

“Good design has inspiration to it… if you have that vision you can encode it and
parameterize it and explore it further.
Now we have a rich flora of options.”
(Autodesk, 4)

CPM schedulers, planners, oversight wizards, and Clueless Emperor CFOs and public capital construction directors, have been under servicing the building industry to alarming levels of incompetence ever since a time before most of us can recall. By many measures, less than one-quarter of all work set in place in a given year meets budget or targeted deadline. Add to this torpor negative productivity rates, and you have the perfect breeding ground for disruption, and that disruption
could
be artificial intelligence.

The lagging performance of productivity in the US construction industry as compared with other industries makes is ripe for artificial intelligence disruption.  Pairing that with recent news that the US economy grew at the infinitesimal rate  of 0.7% this fiscal quarter reflects this incompetence.  Change will come gradually from without, not within, as the building industry is notoriously technophobic, and reactively resistant to change.

Historically, the construction and building industries tend to fall on the lower scale of tech-savviness, or digital-bandwidth, owing to a lack of skilled practitioners, and a paucity of training investment in their constituency, but moreso to a general disdain for technology that creates a techno-disconnect between the design and building, and tech and building industries. graph This lameness is not isolated: similar conundrums exist in the UK and Germany. graph The concept of Artificial Intelligence is interpolated in many different ways, depending on who you talk to. Like any subject, the less one comprehends, the less one can see the possibilities. A software developer will have considerable more insight into potential AI technology than a lay person. That said, not all lay people are of equal tech-savvy. Historically, the building industry has maintained a Flinstonian antagonism toward productivity enhancements, as people fear (rightly) for their jobs. Owing to a general incompetence (30% success rate) and obdurate negative productivity growth (see graph, above), the construction industry will experience AI disruption that it never saw coming. Traditionally, technology advances trickle down from the design to the building industry. Such was the case with AutoCadd, and to a lesser extent BIM. BIM is not at all well mainstreamed into the building industry, as it is with design industry, despite fake-news I have refuted in this column. As I have recently posted, project controls: estimation and planning-the black-sheep of the building industry family, will be one of the first professions to be (gradually) outphased as a consequence of AI evolution. BIM is fairly well-mainstreamed in the design industry-projects over the $10M level, but the caveat is that designers have become over-reliant on BIM clash-detections to the point that many may not even bother to do any at all. Those operators who do not are at high risk of imminent obsolescence at the behest of Revit Auto-route. If current performance is any indication, the design industry is also ripe for disruption. Or rather, there is a lot of opportunity to streamline the design process. AI integration into the design industry will translate to a fraction of present resources for a markedly more efficient output product. Detroit never saw the Rust Belt days ahead of them: that led to their own undoing. AI will inevitably hit the building industry, which is basically living in Bedrock.

Nothing has the ability to inspire in equal measure passion or loathing than the immodest megaproject. Whether conceived of necessity or vain extravagance, there seems to be no discussion possible without an abundance of superlatives-not all of them laudatory. Yet today's megaprojects will be remembered more for the utter incompetence in their planning and execution, than for the finished (if ever) product. At some point in the recent past, the biggest challenge to megaprojects shifted focus from the capacity to overcome engineering obstacles and work encumbrances, to the planning and administrative processes. In other words, it is seldom the case where builders can't build: it is overly complicated bureaucracies and uncoordinated design efforts that prevent builders from doing so. The circumstance is ubiquitous. It creates an environment of adversity among the project team, and perpetuates a long tarnished record of losing propositions. Many encumbrances persist even in the face of the supposed panaceas of BIM, public-private partnerships, and integrated project delivery systems (IPD). The building industry doesn't seem to do a lot to heal itself. Indeed, the industry that needs the most improvement in its planning and management structures is the ones most resistant to change, as is noted in studies of software adaptation: the building industry ranks dead last. [i] Part of the reason is that the design and building industries seldom use the same software platforms, and are very reluctant to adopt a third-party's system.

Like construction project management, CPM Resource & Cost Loading is a science in which the best practitioners have administrative, as well as practical and theoretical skills specific to the industry in which they work. This condition generates some interesting perceptions, all of which point to a lack of consensus as to which schedulers are best suited to which industries, if any, and how well qualified they might be to generate resource and cost loading. In one corner, as I have said in previous posts, are the certification agencies, from which various non-industry specific certificates are issued to applicants, many of whose industry experience has been, and will be, chiefly confined to desks and textbooks. Those with both the industry experience as well as the certifications have the highest expectations. Those with only a certificate to show have the lowest expectation. But then there are crack schedulers, autodidacts (self-taught), and various hybrids in between, who can out-schedule the best of certified schedulers. In other words, a motivated field mechanic with years' experience would be a better candidate to train as a scheduler than a rookie with a freshly printed certificate What is it that best practice schedulers with little or no book experience utilize to cost and resource load their schedules? It depends who you work for. If you work for a subcontractor, optimally you would have experience in that trade. Conversely, a scheduler with little or no experience in a given trade is hard-pressed to resource and cost-load his schedules. This is because he lacks the nuts-and-bolts, or assembly and prosecution sequence of operations, that an industry specialized scheduler has, and the estimating prowess to parse quantity take offs into cost loading. On a good day, he has the sense to know what questions need to be answered, and who to ask. Why would an electrical contractor take-on a scheduler who only had plumbing experience? We must add this conundrum to the mix when contemplating the dearth of project controls talent in the industry: the electrician would seldom have the luxury of waiting to find a scheduler with electrical background. The same holds true for project managers in other industries: you wouldn't take a software project manager and assign him to lead a construction project without a considerable internship. In other words, experience seldom translates across industries, and often not even within industries. One huge advantage industry specific project controls professionals have when preparing cost and resource loading is the ability to visualize and interpolate complex assemblies when data is limited or inaccessible. Schedulers working for general contractors and construction managers have a harder task on their hands because they are frequently the de facto scheduler for all trades that failed or neglected to issue a CPM schedule. This means they should have a minimum of working knowledge of all trades. In the trades in which they are less informed, they will get with the subcontractors, build a timeline with them, and use that schedule as a project control. But a subcontractor will be reluctant to share all of his cost-loading data – if he even has it, with a contractor, as these data are proprietary.

CPM baselines are snarky by nature. Many project teams regard them as ends in themselves: issued preliminarily, and then discarded, as opposed to “that to which all that follows shall be compared” (my definition).  I expect stakeholders who don’t realize the absence of a baseline bar in their schedules would like to see them, if the contractor was willing to accommodate. Despite endless permutations of schedule specifications, I rarely come across ones that require baseline comparisons.

One hears an awful lot of talk about Building Information Modeling (BIM) these days, and BIM has a lot to show for all the chatter, as the recent 2014 AIA Technology in Architectural Practice (TAP) BIM Awards do in stunning fashion. A great link (better than AIA's) can be found at Building Design + Construction's website , where slide-shows of each award winning project can be viewed or downloaded. There were a smattering of BIM applications exhibited at TAP, and all the various attributes of BIM are featured: • Maximum communication and visualization of design intent to owner (Shanghai Disney) • Complex layered rendering and modeling that was used for constructability analysis, and the shop-drawing, fabrication, and construction processes (Perot, ARTIC, Outpatient Care Pavilion) • Laser scan and plotting of existing space to facilitate retrofit (Van Buren Office Building) • Cost-savings and expedited schedule (Van Buren Office Building, Pegula) • Facility Management (Rehabilitation Hospital) Looking at the more opulent AIA winners, it seems that the most impressive works are those that involve complex geometry, such as compound curves, e.g., ARTIC, and the Morphosis designed Perot Museum. The Perot Museum is notable in that it substantially incorporated BIM into the shop-drawing, fabrication, and construction processes; as a builder, what I perceive to be a maximum benefit of a BIM program. On the other hand, it was noted that " steel erection finished one-week ahead of schedule, " indeed, a negligible achievement on a project of this complexity. The best ROI for BIM on any project is when it realizes most or all of the benefits BIM has to offer. For example, a costly BIM program that only is used to generate bling for PR purposes is a futile intellectual exercise. Early 3-D modeling, such as that used on Gehry's Bilbao Museum, inspired the advent of 3-D digital modeling into architecture, which evolved into BIM. The technology was originally intended to facilitate BLOB architecture-that was considered stylish at the time-which it did with robotic laser scanning; a technique gleaned from the aviation industry. The more generic and boxy Pegula Ice Arena probably could have been built just as easily without BIM. However, for projects with complex infrastructure, such as the Outpatient Care Pavilion's mechanical floor, BIM helped facilitate clash detection, or when various elements or program are subject to spatial conflict. Of course, clash detection could still have been conducted manually, or in the traditional fashion. The point being that BIM makes more sense for complex projects. For your garden variety or average projects, implementation of BIM would constitute overkill. The over the top $5.5B Enchanted Storybook Castle, Shanghai Disneyland Park, at number 5, was also touted by the AIA. But integration of BIM for this project seems more of an intellectual exercise, than a practical application, i.e., a lot of tedious fancy layered modeling to wow the owners and clock up billable hours. Between the building team of Walt Disney Imagineering and Gehry Technologies, I daresay there were no holds barred. The TAP jury stated " (they) are doing what all architects should be doing. They are saving having to reconstruct. They use many different tools that

Google has recently begun making its long anticipated self-3D mapping software Project Tango, available to developers interested in using the platform as a foundation for software and apps for their tablet. Tango's sensors and camera generate augmented and 3-D virtual reality (AR/VR) renderings into goggles that can be transferred or shared across devices in real time and space. To do this, it needs to know where it is in space, and in relation to external objects. The technology is nascent, but it is expected that Tango 3-D virtual products might hit the market over the next few years. Excepting gaming apps, it will be some time before a real demand drives it into more useful applications. I expect the expect building industry would be one of the last fronts of adaptation, and just like BIM only at the insistence of the design industry. Will Tango turn out to be just a plaything for the design industry that builders ignore, or will builders embrace the applications that will be developed for their use? " Builders will have access to cutting-edge AR/VR apps: but will they make ample use of them, or will they be the last to adapt, as they always have? First, the many applications Tango facilitates must be fully explored. This will take several years. Apps that can help builders will be late to hit market, That is a source of great disappointment to me, because I am certain that the industry could benefit in a myriad of ways from AR/VR technology. Here are some of my concepts for future Tango builder apps: 1. Tango tablets will all but make surveyors obsolete by providing faster and more accurate data. You will be able to perform pro forma constructability reviews right from your tablet. For example, you could put on the head-set, and generate a real time rendering of an existing space. Next, you would overlay that rendering with the proposed BIM model, and see how it fits the actual space, and walk through it. 2. BIM MEP coordination meetings will include VR headsets, where each layer of installation can be viewed in 3-D, dimensioned in real time, and issued directly to the fabricator. 3. Robots with mounted tablets could access limited clearances spaces and generate a survey with which team members could view and collaborate in real time. They can also enable those with limiting physical disabilities to access information that would otherwise be unavailable to them. 4. Robots with mounted tablets could access HAZMAT or DECON areas anywhere there is a threat of contamination to workers, and relay a 3-D rendering of the space in real time back to the controller. 5. Robots with mounted tablets could travel the site and report on safety conditions, such as allowable slope of excavation, or sufficient clearance in a trench. 6. Mock-ups can be readily generated in the AR/VR environment obviating the need for time consuming procurement and fabrication windows.

How Google Tango VR/AR Apps Could Level the BIM Playing Field Designers will forced to begrudgingly collaborate with builders in program coordination: they will sink or swim. Despite the hype-such as that which I brought to light in McGraw Hill's skewed Annual BIM Survey, there soon won't be enough time to waste on arguing over the alleged rate of BIM adaptation because 3-D self-mapping technology and application development will create tools that do much of what BIM does in a fraction of the time, at a fraction of the cost. " BIM will become a means to an end in program coordination, not a (loose) end in itself. That's something the design industry must prepare its members for. The potential empowerment of end-users and stakeholders by the advent of VR/AR environments as design driving tools cannot be underestimated. For example, persnickety clients will be able to 'walk through' endless VR combinations of light, space, color, and building program, giving them a visualization that design professionals take for granted. Such interactive mock-ups will obviate the need for endless and invariably futile design permutations that are inconsistent with the end-user's expectations, and simply a waste of his time and resources. " There's no reason for systemic or ubiquitous program coordination in the middle of construction if the design team has done its job. When does that ever happen? If designers and end-users had the ability to interact with VR/AR environments, then just consider the billions of billable drafting hours that could be saved in the costs to manually generate uncoordinated renderings and BIM mock-ups that don't substantially inform end-users of their specific design-intent. Besides, BIM models on a screen will seem puny in comparison to VR constructed mock-ups. That may be good news for end-users and stakeholders, but I expect bad news for BIM jockeys and proponents who are prone to sequestration or otherwise make a meal out of redesigning their way out of program conflicts they have themselves to blame for. Once they open their BIM models to a VR immersion environment, all designs will be readily accessible to all team-members, for better or worse: there will be no place to hide errors and omissions. " Program conflicts will be the responsibility of the design team, as they should be, not the builder. Pre-Construction will include Pre-coordination and constructability studies of major program elements. Many architects don't bother to resolve even the most blatant program conflicts in their BIM models, punting that burden off to the builder. Some may be lazy, overburdened, or more often just don't understand structural and MEP engineering components. They sometimes will

Artificial Intelligent CPM Scheduling Algorithmic Optimizations and Machine Learning " Good design has inspiration to it… if you have that vision you can encode it and parameterize it and explore it further. Now we have a rich flora of options. " (Autodesk, 4) CPM schedulers, planners, oversight wizards, and Clueless Emperor CFOs and public capital construction directors, have been under servicing the building industry to alarming levels of incompetence ever since a time before most of us can recall. By many measures, less than one-quarter of all work set in place in a given year meets budget or targeted deadline. Add to this torpor negative productivity rates, and you have the perfect breeding ground for disruption, and that disruption will be artificial intelligence. " Can the building industry jump the shark from Flintstones to Jetsons? In the last century, CPM scheduling was traditionally performed by trained personnel. At some period in the latter part of the century, the supply as well as the demand became decimated, and the industry was deprecated to a considerable dearth of scheduler talent, or what we have to work with today. The reasons for this are somewhat beyond the scope of this present discussion. On the AE and owner side, they have made adjustments to make the best of the sub-optimal material they are given. " Epidemic poor project control practices and management have enfeebled the industry when they should empower it. Some two third of today's building industry now use project managers as their de facto CPM schedulers. Coincidentally, some three-quarters of all work in place fails to make the deadlines these schedules target, though one can hardly saddle the scheduler with all the blame. By combining a project manager and (very part-time) scheduler into one job description contractors have been doubling down on this general conditions contract requirement by giving it short shrift or ignoring it altogether. That's no small consideration to stakeholders and owners who pay for the service and simply don't get it. They need dead-nuts cost loading, EVAs, and projections, to manage their assets efficiently and with quality information. If a CPM schedule is not properly cost loaded, it will not be useful as a cash-flow managing tool. Moreover, a cost-loaded CPM schedule is never sufficient as the sole means of control: robust analysis and forensic programs and risk-assessments are needed for executive level controls. The current crop of CPM schedulers The reasons why trained CPM schedulers don't do more than one-quarter of all CPM scheduling is because it is generally considered by many GCs as discretionary spending-read: " that which can be forgone without losing much skin: the ability to make a delay claim, should the time come, is one downside of not keeping track, the other is a lack of accountability. Contractors' ROI on claims is so parsimonious that the necessity of tracking a schedule seems like a waste of time.

Artificial Intelligent CPM Scheduling Algorithmic Optimizations and Machine Learning " Good design has inspiration to it… if you have that vision you can encode it and parameterize it and explore it further. Now we have a rich flora of options. " (Autodesk, 4) CPM schedulers, planners, oversight wizards, and Clueless Emperor CFOs and public capital construction directors, have been under servicing the building industry to alarming levels of incompetence ever since a time before most of us can recall. By many measures, less than one-quarter of all work set in place in a given year meets budget or targeted deadline. Add to this torpor negative productivity rates, and you have the perfect breeding ground for disruption, and that disruption will be artificial intelligence. " Can the building industry jump the shark from Flintstones to Jetsons? In the last century, CPM scheduling was traditionally performed by trained personnel. At some period in the latter part of the century, the supply as well as the demand became decimated, and the industry was deprecated to a considerable dearth of scheduler talent, or what we have to work with today. The reasons for this are somewhat beyond the scope of this present discussion. On the AE and owner side, they have made adjustments to make the best of the sub-optimal material they are given. " Epidemic poor project control practices and management have enfeebled the industry when they should empower it. Some two third of today's building industry now use project managers as their de facto CPM schedulers. Coincidentally, some three-quarters of all work in place fails to make the deadlines these schedules target, though one can hardly saddle the scheduler with all the blame. By combining a project manager and (very part-time) scheduler into one job description contractors have been doubling down on this general conditions contract requirement by giving it short shrift or ignoring it altogether. That's no small consideration to stakeholders and owners who pay for the service and simply don't get it. They need dead-nuts cost loading, EVAs, and projections, to manage their assets efficiently and with quality information. If a CPM schedule is not properly cost loaded, it will not be useful as a cash-flow managing tool. Moreover, a cost-loaded CPM schedule is never sufficient as the sole means of control: robust analysis and forensic programs and risk-assessments are needed for executive level controls. The current crop of CPM schedulers The reasons why trained CPM schedulers don't do more than one-quarter of all CPM scheduling is because it is generally considered by many GCs as discretionary spending-read: " that which can be forgone without losing much skin: the ability to make a delay claim, should the time come, is one downside of not keeping track, the other is a lack of accountability. Contractors' ROI on claims is so parsimonious that the necessity of tracking a schedule seems like a waste of time.