Schedule Estimates for Preconstruction Activities of Highway Projects-Review of The Literature

Abstract

Among the multiple causes of project success in construction of big projects (such as highway projects), punctually delivering of preconstruction activities is increasingly recognized as a quite frequent cause that has not received adequate amount of attention. In this research, after providing an introduction about the different phases and activities in a construction project, the reasons behind the importance of preconstruction activities is briefly summarized. Scheduling of these types of activities is complex in nature mostly because of the unclear path toward delivering them; therefore, inaccurate scheduling of them is common. Since it is a very demanding and difficult responsibility to organize the literature efficiently, the literature is classified into five different groups to accelerate this effort; These groups are environmental clearance, design, right-of-way acquisition, utility adjustment, and finally advertising and letting; In this research, these categories and their definitions are provided in detail. After conducting a comprehensive literature review, the results of this study show that there is a lack of a quantitative model for predicting schedules associated with various preconstruction activities. Beside many other causes behind this need, the main reason is that the approach of most of the previous studies was qualitative and the few ones that have conducted a quantitative research on historical data had a small sample size.