Significant factors affecting construction productivity

Abstract

A conceptual model, stratified model for factors affecting productivity, was built to present the relationship among factors of different levels. Unproductive activities influenced productivity directly. The unproductive activities were the result of the work conditions, which should be traced to the project-related factors.A list of common unproductive activities on site was determined through interview with professional persons. Then a structured survey was conducted to collect the data of project feature, work condition, and productivity.A neural network model was developed to identify the significant unproductive activities that heavily affect productivity. Altogether eight waste sources were deemed to be sufficiently significant.The relationships among the project-level factors and the eight wastes have been studied by simple regression analysis. A set of criteria was developed to minimize the on-site wastes.Two cases were studied for verifying the validity of the stratified model for factors affecting productivity.