Pouring Concrete Slabs

Pouring Concrete Slabs

For large concrete pours on horizontal slabs, it is important to plan the activity so that the slab for a full block can be completed continuously in a single day. Resources required for pouring the concrete depend upon the technology used. For example, a standard crew for pumping concrete to the slab might include a foreman, five laborers, one finisher, and one equipment operator. Related equipment would be vibrators and the concrete pump itself. For delivering concrete with a chute directly from the delivery truck, the standard crew might consist of a foreman, four laborers and a finisher. The number of crews would be chosen to insure that the desired amount of concrete could be placed in a single day. In addition to the resources involved in the actual placement, it would also be necessary to insure a sufficient number of delivery trucks and availability of the concrete itself.

In addition to precedence relationships and time durations, resource requirements are usually estimated for each activity. Since the work activities defined for a project are comprehensive, the total resources required for the project are the sum of the resources required for the various activities. By making resource requirement estimates for each activity, the requirements for particular resources during the course of the project can be identified. Potential bottlenecks can thus be identified, and schedule, resource allocation or technology changes made to avoid problems.

Many formal scheduling procedures can incorporate constraints imposed by the availability of particular resources. For example, the unavailability of a specific piece of equipment or crew may prohibit activities from being undertaken at a particular time. Another type of resource is space. A planner typically will schedule only one activity in the same location at the same time. While activities requiring the same space may have no necessary technical precedence, simultaneous work might not be possible. Computational procedures for these various scheduling problems will be described in Chapter 2. In this section, we shall discuss the estimation of required resources.