Construction site dewatering analysis using a special purpose simulation-based framework

Abstract

Computer simulation has been successfully implemented in the area of construction management. However, this success has generally been limited to the academic arena with the industry lagging far behind. This failure is partly due to the inherent complexity of general simulators and their inability to abstract the underlying modeling fundamentals. Special purpose simulation (SPS) is a framework developed to address the stated drawbacks by focusing on the needs of the construction practitioner. The idea is to build modeling environments tailored to the specific requirements of a given industry domain. This paper presents the development and implementation of a construction dewatering analysis framework based on the ideas of SPS. Object-oriented design and graphical user interfaces are used in the development of an abstraction layer between a steady state hydrological model and the user. The integration capability of the framework are then presented by constructing an optimization module and linking it to the main modeling environment. A case study is provided to demonstrate the usefulness, intuitiveness, and validity of the framework.Key words: simulation, special purpose simulation, construction dewatering, optimization, computer applications.