The roles of conceptual modelling in improving construction simulation studies: A comprehensive review

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Abstract

The conceptual modelling phase of simulation studies has proven to be effective in enhancing the impact of simulation modelling in different domains. However, this simulation phase did not receive much attention in the construction simulation domain. The objective of this paper is to identify the roles that conceptual modelling can play in advancing the engagement, accuracy, and adoption (among other things) of discrete-event simulation studies in construction. In this paper, a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) is conducted, which involves a comprehensive search of databases and researchers’ profiles to identify journal papers, conference articles, books, and theses that have reported the benefits of conceptual modelling for discrete-event simulation studies. The review resulted in 82 documents that were published from 2000 to 2020. Results indicate that the benefits of conceptual modelling include facilitating communications between stakeholders, capturing sufficient information for the simulation model, improving the quality of simulation models, guiding other simulation modelling activities, and facilitating verification and validation of simulation models. By linking these benefits to the current research agenda in construction simulation, this paper shows the significance and potential of the conceptual modelling phase to enhance the impact of discrete-event simulation studies in construction.

Introduction

Construction projects require extensive management efforts to be successfully delivered due to the intrinsic dynamic and risky nature of construction systems compared to other systems such as manufacturing. Simulation modelling is one of the most powerful analytical methods to help to manage such complex systems due to its ability to evaluate the effects of different management decisions before implementation [1]. Therefore, simulation modelling has attracted the attention of construction researchers for more than five decades [for examples, see Teicholz [2] and McCarron [3]]. In comparison to other domains that successfully adopted simulation modelling in their standard decision-making practices, such as healthcare, defence, and manufacturing, the construction industry has not been able yet to exploit the advantages of simulation modelling. In fact, the use of simulation modelling as a decision-support tool in construction is mainly restricted to academic circles with limited practical success [1], [4]. The latest research agenda developed to address the barriers of simulation adoption in the construction industry suggested four principal actions, including (1) reducing the skills requirements and modelling effort in construction simulation model building, (2) improving the quality of construction simulation models, (3) strengthening the relationship between academia and industry, and (4) integrating simulation modelling into construction engineering curricula [5].

An analysis of the process to conduct a simulation study in the domains that successfully implemented simulation modelling as part of their decision-making standard practices shows that they spend up to 40% of the total simulation modelling effort in the early model development steps [6]. These early steps are recognised as the conceptual modelling phase, which is concerned with system abstraction and model definition [7]. In contrast, construction has typically overlooked these early steps by laying more focus on the later steps of model coding, input data collection and analysis, experimentation, and implementation of results [8], [9], [10]. Overlooking the conceptual modelling stage may lead to unclear model definition, unachieved objectives, and inappropriate decisions, which consequently result in an unsuccessful simulation study [11]. A conceptual model provides unambiguous documentation of the structure and components of the final simulation model [12]. Therefore, the process of building a conceptual model is acknowledged as the most critical task for carrying out a typical simulation study [13]. The process comprises some particular aspects that have recently caught the attention of the construction simulation community, such as the need for accurate problem formulation and the importance of model reuse to improve construction simulation studies [8], [9], [10].

This paper explores the benefits of utilising the conceptual modelling phase of simulation studies to address its main question:

  • Can conceptual modelling enhance the impact of simulation modelling in construction?

Based on the research question, two objectives were defined. First, identifying the reported benefits of the conceptual modelling phase for simulation studies. Second, testing whether the identified benefits can be matched with the construction simulation research directions recommended by Abdelmegid, González, Poshdar, O'Sullivan, Walker and Ying [5] (mentioned in the bottom of the first paragraph of Section 1).

Most simulation research in construction has utilised the Discrete Event Simulation (DES) approach [1], [14]. Therefore, this research has focused on the conceptual modelling phase of DES, which is referred to as simulation modelling in the remainder of this paper.

The rest of the paper is set out as follows. The next section provides background on how conceptual modelling was addressed in construction simulation research to highlight the lack of research on conceptual modelling in construction in comparison to other simulation domains. Section 3 explains the design of the SLR that was followed to answer the research question. The results of the literature search are then presented in Section 4, followed by descriptive and content analyses of the selected literature. The identified benefits of conceptual modelling are discussed in the Section 6. Section 7 presents a discussion on the roles of conceptual modelling in improving construction simulation studies based on the findings from the content analysis. The paper closes with concluding remarks and future research directions.

Section snippets

Conceptual modelling in construction simulation research

As discussed in the introduction of this paper (Section 1), conceptual modelling received minimal interest in construction simulation research compared to other simulation domains. Some of the popular studies in construction simulation implicitly indicated the importance of conceptual modelling by stressing the need to pay more attention to some aspects of the early stages of simulation studies, without explicit indication of conceptual modelling. For example, Martinez [14] mentioned that

Research design

The design of this review study consists of three phases, as shown in Fig. 1. First, an SLR was conducted to identify the studies most relevant to the research question. SLR is defined as a comprehensive method to address specific research questions by following a transparent, trustworthy, and verifiable methodology to assess and interpret all studies that are relevant to the defined questions [18]. SLR has been gaining more acceptance in the engineering research [19], especially for research

Literature search

This phase involved developing a search protocol, searching databases, and selecting relevant literature. The search protocol was developed collectively by the authors, and it included search keywords, databases, and inclusion/exclusion criteria. As Scopus is an accessible database that covers most of high-quality journals and conferences in the field of simulation modelling [24], it was selected in this study to find relevant articles. Moreover, the ProQuest database was used to expand the

Literature analysis

In this section, we present a descriptive analysis of the selected articles, then an in-depth content analysis that identifies the benefits of conceptual modelling for simulation studies is described followed by quantitative analysis to sort the reported benefits based on the attention they have received in the literature.

Discussion of the benefits of conceptual modelling for simulation

In this section, the benefits are discussed in a descending order based on the frequency of the literature report (as listed in Fig. 2). It is essential to point out that the benefits can be interrelated and multifaceted as researchers might approach the subject from the perspective of the particular objectives that have been defined for using simulation in their field of research.

The roles of conceptual modelling in advancing the performance of simulation studies in construction

In this section, we discuss how we can utilise the benefits of conceptual modelling that were confirmed in different simulation domains to improve the status of simulation modelling in the construction domain. As indicated in the introduction of this paper (Section 1), the use of simulation modelling for operations management in construction is limited to academia with little success in the industry. On top of that, conceptual modelling has not received much research attention in construction

Conceptual modelling for construction simulation: A vision for the future

The research group of the authors is undertaking significant research efforts to bridge the gap between academia and industry, in order to increase the uptake and use of computer simulation modelling in the Architecture-Engineering-Construction (AEC) industry. This is a specific niche area and opportunity where conceptual modelling can play a significant role. In that respect, conceptual modelling is seen as a key link to align simulation modelling to usual management processes and practices in

Conclusion

This paper investigated the potential benefits of using a conceptual modelling phase in construction simulation studies. Two objectives were set to drive the review process. The first objective inspected the benefits of the conceptual modelling phase for a simulation study. The second objective aimed at testing the match between the identified benefits and the current research directions for construction simulation. The synthesis of the SLR results showed that conceptual modelling can

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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