Stabilizing production flow of interior and finishing works with reentrant flow in building construction

Interior and finishing activities in building construction exhibit high degrees of variation as a result of uncertainty in supply chains, variations in work quantities, client changes, and lack of predictability of the production capacity of subcontracting trades. Decisions must constantly be made concerning effective utilization of available resources. Reentrant workflow patterns, where a trade crew returns multiple times to the same space, make production control particularly difficult. We present a method for pull flow control at the operational level through real-time prioritization of pending work packages and daily regulation of crew assignments and trades' production capacities. Application of various heuristics was evaluated using discrete-event simulation of a representative construction project. The experimental results emphasize the importance of dynamic control of allocation of production resources to those mature activities that ensure subsequent (downstream) flow. The most successful policy was to use the second reentrant activity as a bottleneck and to regulate the capacity of the trade with reentrant flows to ensure sufficient feeding of new work to successive crews.