NEW APPROACH FOR DIRECT AND INDIRECT TIME WASTES IN CIVIL CONSTRUCTION ENGINEERING

Although Construction engineering is the oldest domain among civil engineering portfolios, it commands least respect when comes to mitigation in wastes/delays and its theoretical formulations. It is seen from literature that Construction engineering delays form an entity that is not explicitly used in theoretical formulation in construction process flows. Studies on activity oriented time wastes in construction process management is seen to be scarce. Ali and Arun[1] has shown studies on activity oriented time wastes are to be elaborated in order to fine tune process of reducing activity oriented time wastes. This paper proposes detailed study and analysis of time waste based on the research methodology of inductive reasoning to derive at formulations. It is derived that a preferred unit of measuring time waste in construction activities would be units of monetary loss due to wasted time. It was seen from studies that Quantified time waste can be further divided into direct and indirect wastes. Direct waste occurs as a direct result of delay or extension of activities considered beyond its planned duration. And indirect time waste occurs due to any incidence of wasted time other than direct waste. One among many causes would be improper planning, whereby excess time is allotted for an activity. An important method of quantification would be measuring Direct Time Waste (DTW) and Indirect Time Waste (ITW) from various numbers of actual sites considered after estimating the Quantifed Time (QT) required from existing standards taken into account. As the quantities such as ITW and DTW vary from site to site, they take up values that are stochastic in nature. This makes the consideration of a fixed value approach, similar to predicting project durations highly improbable. Hence, only a proper stochastic distribution curve representing percentage of occurrence of DTW and ITW to be a realistic tool for further mathematical research in this abstract area of time waste generation. This paper provides a more realistic approach in quantification of time waste at single activity levels, basing on units of money. Formulation in 2D considering cost and time characteristics in Time waste generation are seen. 3D formulations taking into consideration effect of material overrun is also formulated.