Combined Discrete and Continuous Modeling of Construction Activities Using Three Phase Activity Scanning Approach

Construction operations have been modeled and simulated using Discrete-Event Simulation (DES) with effectiveness and fidelity that has continuously increased over the past four decades. Construction operations often include activities that are simultaneously continuous and stochastic in nature and these activities have typically been modeled by discretization and in some cases using combined discrete-continuous simulation, which presents severe limitations and difficulties in accurate modeling of the system under study. This paper presents a combined discrete and continuous approach that utilizes methods optimized for modeling and simulation of continuous construction activities within the three phase scanning algorithm of a discrete event simulator. The approach includes support for modeling dependent data set, mixed modeling of discrete and continuous activities, discrete and continuous resource flows and other algorithms to improve accuracy and efficiency of the modeling process and simulation results. As part of the study, these methods were implemented as an extension to STROBOSCOPE, a powerful DES tool optimized for construction simulation. A case study of road paving operation is presented to demonstrate improvements and advantages of the combined approach for modeling and simulation of discrete and continuous models for construction operations.