Journal of Applied Science and Engineering

Published by Tamkang University Press

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Team Efficiency Estimation for Construction Process Considering the Collaborative Behaviors

Ming-Hsiu Tsai and Sian-Ren Huang

Department of Civil Engineering, Tamkang University, New Taipei City, Taiwan 251, R.O.C.

Received: September 05, 2018
Accepted: May 07, 2019
Publication Date: May 10, 2026

上傳圖片

(a) Communication network with only formal connections (mapped from the organizational relationships in Figure 8); (b) Communication network with full connections.

 Copyright The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are cited.

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A larger construction project requires the involvement of more professionals in the project team. The efficiency of collaborative interactions among heterogeneous professionals during construction is critical to project success. A social-network-based simulation tool can assist project managers in experimenting and analyzing the efficiency of project teams. Accordingly, this study adopted the social network philosophy to create a team member interaction mechanism and applied the agent-based modeling and simulation approach to develop an agent-based project team collaborative efficiency simulation (PTCES) model for estimating the collaborative efficiency of project teams. In the PTCES model, agents with their collaborative network can execute assigned activities collaboratively so that the team efficiency can be estimated by the simulation manner. An actual building construction case was examined experimentally to calibrate and validate the proposed model, and the results proved the quantitative ability of the PTCES model in estimating team efficiency under different circumstances. The case simulation results also indicated the importance of developing a collaborative culture and reducing the reworking risk for improving the project efficiency. Moreover, a higher collaborative network density was determined to engender higher project efficiency and shorter project duration; however, the impact converged with increasing network density. The proposed model contributes to favorably observing the effect of social network aspects of project management and to efficiently estimating the efficiency and duration of construction projects.

Keywords: Collaboration, Project Management, Agent-based Modeling and Simulation, Social Network, Construction Process Simulation

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