Road Construction—Simulation Game for Site Managers

A computer game has been designed primarily for use in management training, and focusses the player's particular attention on the interference between successive processes. The game simulates weekly progress, the player determining the resource levels and hours of work. He receives in return a summary containing a complete breakdown of the week's progress together with both planned and actual costs. Altogether seven component processes of the construction procedure are simulated, all different in character, each one following its predecessor by a fixed length buffer. Planned values of the work parameters are available to the players, but adherence to them will inevitably lead to poor overall performance because of random progress functions introduced to simulate unforeseen eventualities (machine breakdown, bad weather, inavailability of materials, etc.). Each player controls his own construction project and at the end of the game the various strategies adopted and results obtained can be used as stimuli in a group review.