Chaos and Complexity in Modeling and Detection of Spatial Temporal Clashes in Construction Processes

Spatial temporal clashes happen when workspaces overlap to share the same location at the same time period. The impacts of such overlap, as stated by the literature could extend from loss of productivity to property damage or death. The determination of the magnitude of the clash is based upon many parameters such workspace type and activity criticality. Most of the current clash detection models are deterministic. However, the behavior of the crew (their performance and approach taken towards management of clashes) is more chaotic. The chaos mainly emerges from the dependency of clashes and their consequences on the human interactions among crew members and between different crews. Stochastic modeling and simulation can help, to some extents, in capturing the chaotic nature of such behavior. Increasing the complexity of the model (due to introducing stochastic variables) is theoretically expected to add to the accuracy of simulation outcomes. The first step however, is to determine the sensitivity of the clash detection problem to possible chaotic behavior. This paper defines four possibilities of non-deterministic behavior: uncertain movement, variable productivity, dynamic scheduling, and clash impact butterfly effect. Additionally, this paper reports the results of a simple case study applied to define the fitness of selected clash evaluation models to the changes in workspaces due to the non-deterministic behaviors.