3FORMALIZATION AND AUTOMATION OF TIME-SPACE CONFLICT ANALYSIS

With increasing pressure for shorter delivery schedules, space is a critical resource at construction sites. Current industry practice lacks a formalized approach or a tool to help project managers analyze spatial conflicts between activities prior to construction. Consequently, time-space conflicts occur frequently and significantly impact construction processes. Time-space conflicts have three characteristics which impede the detection and analysis of time-space conflicts prior to construction: (1) They have a temporal aspect, (2) They have different forms creating different problems, (3) Multiple types of spatial conflicts can exist between a pair of conflicting activities. This research formalizes time-space conflict analysis as a classification task and addresses these challenges by automatically (1) detecting conflicts in four dimensions, (2) categorizing the conflicts according to a taxonomy of time-space conflicts developed, and (3) prioritizing the multiple types of conflicts between the same pair of conflicting activities. This research extends previous research on construction space management by developing a taxonomy of time-space conflicts and by defining an approach for th