Simaan M. Abourizk

University of Alberta | UAlberta · Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the School of Mining and Petroleum Engineering

The construction industry relies on heavy equipment to carry out many of its operations. The quality of fleet management within an organization, therefore , can greatly affect an organization's long-term profitability. Making cost-effective decisions about replacing or maintaining equipment requires practitioners to understand and forecast the life...

Risk identification is a knowledge-based process that requires the time-consuming and laborious identification of project-specific risk factors. Current practices for risk identification in construction rely heavily on an expert’s subjective knowledge of the current project and of similar historical projects to determine if a risk may affect the pr...

Singapore's 2030 Green Plan aims to advance the nation's sustainable development agenda in alignment with rising global sustainability concerns. Accordingly, construction research is shifting its focus towards the sustainability impacts of the sector's practices. Residential construction, specifically, constitutes the majority of the sector's opera...

Simulation optimization has been the focus of numerous studies in the area of operations research, with many studies integrating optimization algorithms with simulation models to improve decision-making. Although useful, these studies target particular applications and are built for specific problems. As such, their interoperability and reusability...

Accurate labor resource allocation ensures that tasks are assigned to the most suitable individual(s) and the optimal number of staff are available to complete certain tasks, making it essential for the success of construction projects. This study proposes a methodology for forecasting labor resource requirements for upcoming projects using data mi...

The success of a construction project depends on the execution of numerous project management functions by multiple stakeholders. While digitalization and ‘big data’ solutions have enhanced practice across many sectors, the construction industry has failed to capitalize on such advances. Fragmentation along project value chains, project complexity...

Purpose Integrating construction and site layout planning in mechanized tunnel infrastructure projects is essential due to the mutual impacts of construction planning and site layout decisions. Simulation can incorporate site layout planning and construction planning of tunneling projects in a unified environment. However, simulation adoption by in...

Background: A site layout plan is one of the important decisions to be made in the planning phase of each construction project as it can significantly impact on-site transportation, construction logistics, and safety. This decision could be complicated owing to the uncertainties inherent in construction projects and the complex relationships betwee...

To achieve meaningful results, data-driven decision-support systems in construction require integration of fragmented data from multiple standalone databases. In practice, a manual brute-force approach is often the only available means of integrating structured, yet semantically-ambiguous, construction data. Two common data integration challenges i...

Executed outdoors in high-wind areas, adverse weather conditions represent a significant risk to onshore wind farm construction activities. While methods for considering historical weather data during pre-construction scheduling are available, approaches capable of quantitatively assessing how short-term weather fluctuations may impact upcoming con...

Although many quantitative risk assessment models have been proposed in literature, their use in construction practice remain limited due to a lack of domain-specific models, tools, and application examples. This is especially true in wind farm construction, where the state-of-the-art integrated Monte Carlo simulation and critical path method (MCS-...

Industrial construction is often fast-tracked, with engineering and construction phases progressing simultaneously. In contrast to projects where detailed engineering information is available prior to construction, fast-tracked projects rely on the subjective experience of practitioners to derive preliminary resource plans—often resulting in plans...

Due to a lack of suitable methods, extraction of reporting requirements from lengthy construction contracts is often completed manually. Because of this, the time and costs associated with completing reporting requirements are often informally approximated, resulting in underestimations. Without a clear understanding of requirements, contractors ar...

The success of a construction project depends on the execution of numerous project management functions by multiple stakeholders. While digitalization and ‘big data’ solutions have enhanced practice across many sectors, the construction industry has failed to capitalize on such advances. Fragmentation along project value chains, project complexity...

The success of a construction project depends on the execution of numerous project management functions by multiple stakeholders. While digitalization and 'big data' solutions have enhanced practice across many sectors, the construction industry has failed to capitalize on such advances. Fragmentation along project value chains, project complexity...

Scheduling heavy industrial projects is challenging due to their size and complexity. Three-dimensional space and its discipline-specific tasks are an important asset in congested industrial sites, yet are not easily scheduled early in planning when detailed information is lacking. Although recent approaches have focused on enhancing space and crew...

Project uniqueness and high degrees of customisation have always been challenging characteristics of construction projects and many related operations. This paper describes the simulation of a production line in a cabinet manufacturing facility carried out with the aim of better understanding and improving the production processes particularly asso...

Simulation has assisted engineers in various decision-making processes for decades. Particularly, modeling inputs as probabilistic distributions enables these stochastic models to capture uncertainties and represent random processes. A significant number of studies have developed an accurate input model from a single source type (i.e., quantitative...

Currently, input modeling for Monte Carlo simulation (MSC) is performed either by fitting a probability distribution to historical data or using expert elicitation methods when historical data are limited. These approaches, however, are not suitable for wind farm construction, where—although lacking in historical data—large amounts of subjective kn...

Change management requires effective communication between diverse project participants to control delays and costs. This study applies social network analysis (SNA) to the change order process, mining tremendous volumes of change-order data. Furthermore, this study evaluates change-order related social network characteristics. SNA measures structu...

Wind farm projects are one of the fastest growing sources for renewable energy in Canada. The construction phase of wind farm projects is associated with numerous risks, which may lead to unpredictable consequences during project execution. Uninformed decisions made in response to such risks can lead projects to deviate from original objectives, re...

Adopting Building Information Modelling (BIM) has drastically improved industrial construction processes (e.g. productivity, safety, and quality). Due to intellectual property rights, fast-track processes, and software application compatibility, however, information flow from/to BIM is limited. To increase BIM utilization, the proposed framework in...

Uncertainty can be defined as a state of either incomplete or otherwise bounded knowledge. Simulation models, and the engineering systems that they represent, often contain various types of uncertainty. Different approaches and theories can be applied to model these various types of uncertainty with a range of degrees in difficulty and accuracy. Th...

Although methods for assessing and simulating the influence of safety-related measures on safety performance have been proposed, practical applications remain limited. Data required by these methods are dispersed across departments, necessitating the development or redesign of data warehouses. This research proposes a simulation-based analytics app...

Stochastic, discrete-event simulation modeling has emerged as a useful tool for facilitating decision making in construction. Owing to the rigidity inherent to distribution-based inputs, current simulation models have difficulty incorporating new data in real-time, and fusing these data with subjective judgments. Accordingly, application of this va...

On-site construction in winter consumes a considerable amount of energy and emits a significant volume of greenhouse gases, especially in cold regions. It has been reported that on-site winter heating accounts for 34% of carbon emissions of the framing phase for panelized house construction. In this paper, in order to quantify and analyze car...

Safety incidents are an expected part of construction; their occurrence leads to cost and schedule overruns, and sometimes severe worker injury. Incidents can be reduced through mitigation in the planning phase. To reduce safety incidents, proper quantification of risk impact is necessary throughout the project. Incorporating continuously occurring...

In modular industrial construction, prefabricated modules are usually lifted with mobile cranes. Development of reliable heavy lift plans using conventional planning tools, however, remains a challenging and time-consuming task. This article presents an Auction-based Simulation for Industrial Crane Operations (ASICO)—a powerful and flexible auction...

The construction industry continues to experience an elevated number of accidents and fatalities, rendering safety a major concern for many construction companies. To develop more effective, proactive strategies capable of reducing future accidents, safety performance must be monitored and assessed prior to incident occurrence. Safety leading indic...

Proactive approaches designed to prevent incidents before they occur are essential for achieving effective safety management. Emerging as an important component of proactive safety management, leading indicators are used to assess and control safety performance. With the aim of reducing the number or severity of worksite accidents, methods capable...

An essential component of effective safety management systems is the identification and proactive mitigation of hazards through the completion of job hazard assessment (JHA). Aimed at identifying potential hazards and subsequently implementing controls that reduce the likelihood or severity of incidents, JHA is a manual process influenced by the ex...

The construction industry relies heavily on the use of equipment. Equipment management for a single project is, in itself, challenging, and large contractors who want to achieve long-term success must also manage equipment at an intraorganizational level. While vast amounts of data are collected and updated dynamically to track equipment status wit...

Considering the physically demanding nature of manual tasks in the construction industry, an effective approach to mitigating ergonomic risks is to prevent the unsafe working conditions proactively during design and planning, also known as Prevention through Design (PtD). However, there is a lack of approaches for identifying the potential ergonomi...

Labor is one of the most critical resources in the construction industry due to its impact on the productivity, safety, quality, and cost of a construction project. Ergonomic assessment, as a tool and method for analyzing human activities and their interactions with the surrounding environment, is thus crucial for designing operations and workplace...

The acquisition, ownership, and operation costs of construction equipment represent a considerable portion of a general contractor’s budget. The ability to accurately estimate the current market value of equipment is vital for successful fleet management. Although market valuation models have been built, they do not consider the impact of human beh...

Project uniqueness and high degree of customization have always been a challenging aspect of construction projects and many related operations. This paper describes the simulation of a production line in a kitchen cabinet manufacturing facility that was carried out with the aim of better understanding and improving the production process. Discrete...

Assessment models capable of determining the impact of various safety-related scenarios on safety performance have been developed and described in the literature. In spite of this, however, practical implementation of this work remains limited due to the inability of these models to consider the dynamic nature of construction processes. This paper...

This paper aims to develop a novel, data-driven simulation model to quantitatively assist decision-support in quality-induced rework cost estimation and control for construction product fabrication. At the core of the model is a specialized absorbing Markov chain, which stochastically models the construction product fabrication process while consid...

This paper proposes an uncertain data clustering approach to quantitatively analyze the complexity of prefabricated construction components through the integration of quality performance-based measures with associated engineering design information. The proposed model is constructed in three steps, which (1) measure prefabricated construction produ...

Although the use of safety-related measures (SRM) has been advocated in the literature, construction companies often rely on reactive indicators instead of SRM to evaluate safety performance. A challenge with using SRM in practice arises when faced with the uniqueness of construction organizations. Distinctive practices and cultures affect the avai...

Construction projects are predominantly managed with a heavy reliance on the knowledge and experience of construction professionals and supporting enterprise resource planning systems. The construction sector continues to struggle with the management, analysis, and transformation of data into useful information for improved decision-making. While d...

This research aims to enhance industrial pipe welding quality management decision support processes from both an operational and tactical management level by introducing a quantitatively driven analytics approach that allows simulation models to be adjusted by real-time data and measurements. The approach sources and extracts useful information fro...

Reaction time of a snow removal project, which is defined as the duration between the time that snow begins accumulating at a road section and the time that snow is plowed, is a project performance indicator that can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of truck allocation strategies. While sensors, such as truck GPS (global positioning system) an...

This paper proposes a Bayesian statistics-based analytical solution and a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method-based numerical solution to estimate the credible interval for fraction nonconforming. Both solutions provide a more accurate, reliable, and interpretable estimation of sampling uncertainty and can be used to improve the functionality of...

The performance of a safety management system (SMS) is influenced by a large number of internal and external factors. Loss of control of these factors can create unsafe conditions, which can eventually lead to worksite accidents. Identification and prioritization of these factors is crucial for optimal SMS performance. However, because of the compl...

Reliable estimation of construction project costs requires generation of accurate quantity take-offs. Quantity take-offs are, traditionally, experience-based exercises that are often tedious and time-consuming. Although the BIM platform has been used to improve accuracy and efficiency of quantity take-offs, its widespread use is limited by the inte...

Workers in the construction industry are frequently exposed to physically demanding manual tasks with a high level of ergonomic risk. To prevent ergonomic injuries and disorders, posture-based ergonomic evaluation methods, which require inputs describing the worker’s posture (e.g., body joint angles), have been developed and are used widely in prac...

In construction, safety related measures have been proposed to evaluate ongoing safety performance and reduce the identified risk proactively. However, the relationships between these measures and on-site incident records merit further investigation from a practical perspective (e.g., data collection and sharing at an organizational level). This pa...

Behavior-based safety (BBS) management programs aim to reduce the occurrence of accidents by preventing unsafe behaviors through observation and intervention. Although the application of BBS program is encouraged throughout safety management literature, the quantitative impact of implementing BBS programs on industrial modular construction worksite...

Due to the labour-intensiveness of the construction industry, accurate estimation of cycle time of manual activities is essential for reliable planning and scheduling of operations. Labour productivity study is used in current practice to obtain the required cycle time of manual tasks. However, the reliability of labour productivity study in estima...

The use of motion sensing technologies for ergonomic analysis of worker motions has gained increasing attention in construction. Using motion capture data enables extracting ergonomic assessment inputs more accurately than through a human observer. Accordingly, methods of collecting and analyzing human motion data have been developed to automate th...

Assessment of budget sufficiency and resource utilization for a resource-constrained project schedule is crucial to ensure practical feasibility of the schedule and successful delivery of a construction project. This paper proposes a quantitative assessment approach for characterizing budget sufficiency and resource utilization for a resource-const...

As critical components of mining and construction projects, earthmoving operations utilise heavy equipment to execute excavation, loading, hauling, dumping, grading, and compacting tasks in a repetitive and almost continuous manner. Previous models tend to simulate these operations at a higher level, which ignores various independent factors such a...

This paper discusses a novel approach for resource-based scheduling that builds upon existing analytical models to achieve practical allocation of resources that are constrained by supply and demand. The approach facilitates workface planning to allocate work to individual craft persons. The main contribution of the work is advancement of the curre...

Existing resource scheduling methodologies are insufficient for controlling workflows for individual craft persons in project and workface planning. In practice, the workflow of an individual resource is assigned by a project manager in consideration of the resource supply and resource demand for particular time periods of the project duration. Thi...

The measurement and control of incident root causes allows for proactive activities to mitigate risk in advance. In practice, however, it is difficult to identify and collect data that represent the root causes due to the complexity of incident occurrence processes. Despite previous studies on incident causation modelling, the identification of roo...

Skilled labor is critical to any construction project. The determination of optimum resource supply quantities over different project time periods compounds the resource-constrained project scheduling problem, which has yet to be formally formulated and analytically solved. Previous related research endeavors focused on the allocation of finite qua...

The critical path method (CPM) provides the standard approach to scheduling construction projects. Limited crew resources compound CPM analysis by imposing resource availability constraints. However, there is no generalized methodology yet to quantitatively determine the optimal quantities of resources to execute specific work packages based on CPM...

This research is intended to generate relevant and quantitative decision support based on limited data and information available in the context of planning earthmoving operations at the site-grading design or early project planning stage. The researchers apply and extend the concept of haul effort in a two-axis grid. This enables calculation of the...