Challenges and Opportunities for Innovation in the Public Works ...

Sharing Experience Between Manufacturing and Construction
3.3 Exploit the Natural Evolution of System Level Problems
While it would be possible to blindly apply concurrent engineering tools to problems in
manufacturing, construction and infrastructure management, such an approach ignores much of
what has been learned in the last ten years. Improving the quality of decision making in these
areas requires more fundamental considerations than just simply implementing better procedures
for cost controls or managing change requests. We must examine the complexity of concurrent
engineering from the perspective that this approach is intrinsically a system-level problem. In
general, there are three required levels of understanding, namely event, process, and methodology
which must be understood before sound solutions to a system problem are possible. The event
level focuses on individual results (or cases) and experiences gained from these results. The
process level involves underlying reasons (e.g. physics, mechanisms, rationales) upon which the
events were based. At the methodology level, various paradigms and theories, either empirical
or analytical, are proposed to explain and guide event occurrences based on the understanding
of their respective processes. It is important to note that one can only arrive at a sound system
solution through a gradual evolution through these consecutive levels of understanding.
Table I summarizes research and development challenges in manufacturing, design, concurrent
engineering, and infrastructure management. In manufacturing, different operations (i.e. events)
were treated as black boxes and experience-based knowledge dominated the community before
1950. The work of Dr. M. E. Merchant in 1950 marked significant turning point with the
introduction of the notion of manufacturing systems (6a). Unfortunately, early research attempted
to leap directly to a systems approach without a sound understanding of manufacturing processes
and methodologies. As a result, even though discussion of manufacturing systems continued
from the 1960s through the 1980s, the significant research results in this era were reported from
the studies of the physics involved in various manufacturing processes. Results from these
studies gave us a clear understanding of detailed mechanisms and enabled us to propose different
methodologies to control manufacturing operations for improved results. Only after this long
journey through event, process, and methodology, are we now able to produce useful results for
manufacturing systems, 30 years after Merchant's initial proposal (6b).
Although not thought of as a system-level problem yet, recent research on engineering
maintenance and repair (REMR) has begun to exhibit many of these properties (7). Early field
work emphasized the need to inventory and, later, inspect the condition of such large civil works
structures as locks and other structures within navigable waterways. During the past six years,
a number of computer-based systems have been developed to automate the maintenance of
inspection data for these structures (8). These programs have recently grown to emphasize the
reporting of status for groups of structures and attempts to use life-cycle process knowledge to
assign a condition index (CI). The condition index along with its underlying rationale is
comparable to the physics of manufacturing discussed above. Surely, system level integration
and coordination of activity was an implicit goal of the REMR effort. Unfortunately, the data
from inspections and validation of CI calculation mechanisms is not yet assernbled into
methodologies for infrastructure management. Based on the experience with manufacturing,
results becoming available from the use of REMR tools over the next few years should spur the
development of new paradigms and theories of managing large infrastructure systems. These new
paradigms will need to be embodied in infonriation systems in order to be most effective.
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