Proceedings of the 2010 Winter Simulation Conference B. Johansson, S. Jain, J. Montoya-Torres, J. Hugan, and E. Yücesan, eds. IDENTIFICATION OF INFORMATION REQUIREMENTS USING SIMULATION FOR SUPPORITING CONSTRUCTION PRODUCTIVITY ASSESSMENT Seyed Mohsen Shahandashti Burcu Akinci James Garrett Lucio Soibelman Carnegie Mellon University 5000 Forbes Ave Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA ABSTRACT Project managers need to assess how well construction crews are performing in terms of productivity. This paper presents the preliminary results of an effort carried out by the authors to develop a simulation based framework to support the identification of the information requirements for assessing productivity performance. A prototype to test the proposed framework for the identification of information require- ments by studying the assessment of earthmoving productivity is introduced. Based on literature regard- ing the factors that can affect earthmoving productivity, several scenarios, representing different factors that affect earthmoving productivity, have been created and studied. These scenarios have been simulated to help to identify the information items required for assessing earthmoving productivity, such as hauling distance and loading time. Several potential data capture technologies, such as GPS, RFID and On-Board Instrument can help in acquiring the information items identified in this paper. 1 INTRODUCTION Project managers need to assess how well construction crews are performing in terms of productivity. A prototype to test the preliminary simulation based framework for the identification of information re- quirements for assessing earthmoving productivity is introduced in this paper. This prototype consists of different earthmoving scenarios which were designed and simulated to test the framework. In order to as- sess earthmoving productivity and to investigate the effect of different factors on earthmoving productivi- ty, first, we need to measure productivity. Section 2 presents a metric used in this paper to measure prod- uctivity and the required information items for measuring it. In order to assess earthmoving productivity in a construction jobsite, the required information items related to the factors which affect the productivity should also be collected. To identify these required in- formation items, we developed some earthmoving scenarios based on known factors that affect earthmov- ing productivity. We conducted a literature review and did scenario simulation to identify the correspond- ing required information items to assess productivity of the earth moving operation in each scenario. Section 3 discusses the scenarios and the required information items to assess earthmoving productivity in those scenarios. Different data capture technologies can be used to collect the required information for measuring and assessing earthmoving productivity from the jobsite. The potential data capture technologies and the po- tential generic data sources for providing the required information items for measuring and assessing earthmoving productivity are discussed at the end of Section 2 and 3, respectively.. Generic data sources such as soil databases and RS Means (2007) are not specific to the project under study. 3076 978-1-4244-9864-2/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE