Addressing information flow in lean production management and control in construction

Traditionally, production control on construction sites has been a challenging area, where the ad-hoc production control methods foster uncertainty - one of the biggest enemies of efficiency and smooth production flow. Lean construction methods such as the Last Planner System have partially tackled this problem by addressing the flow aspect through means such as constraints analysis and commitment planning. However, such systems have relatively long planning cycles to respond to the dynamic production requirements of construction, where almost daily if not hourly control is needed. New solutions have been designed by researchers to improve this aspect such as VisiLean, but again these types of software systems require the proximity and availability of computer devices to workers. Given this observation, there is a need for a communication system between the field and site office that is highly interoperable and provides real-time task status information. A High-level communication framework (using VisiLean) is presented in this paper, which aims to overcome the problems of system integration and improve the flow of information within the production system. The framework provides, among other things, generic and standardized interfaces to simplify the "push" and "pull" of the right (production) information, whenever needed, wherever needed, by whoever needs it. Overall, it is anticipated that the reliability of the production control will be improved.