Emerging Technology to Model Dynamic Knowledge Creation and Flow among Construction Industry Stakeholders during the Critical Feasibility-Entitlements Phase

Managing facility development is challenging for several reasons. For instance, the developer's organizational structure differs over multiple workflow processes, and changes over different development phases. As another instance, individuals and organizations become affiliated on a temporary—or even virtual—basis, yet they must learn quickly how to work together as a coherent team. Managing the development of affordable housing is even more challenging, for financing regulatory requirements add burden to an already complex management task, and little organizational learning—through the flow of knowledge—appears to manifest itself from one challenging project to the next. Supporting this challenging management and learning task motivates us to employ agent-based simulation technology to model and analyze the development process—before the project begins—and thereby seek to improve project performance through enhanced owner-design-construction coordination. Further, such new technology can support the dynamic process of knowledge creation and flow among temporary stakeholders, who do not belong to the project sponsor's organization, but whose combined decisions during the entitlements-feasibility phase impact the facility's overall implementation time and cost. We model the pre-construction activities of an affordable housing project in California, as a particularly challenging case, to illustrate how an agent-based organization simulation tool can be used to analyze dynamic knowledge creation and flow. Despite the challenge associated with modeling the affordable housing case, however, the technology and approach articulated in the paper remain quite general, and should also apply well to more-conventional construction projects and organizations, across all project phases.