Pull planning versus push planning: Investigating impacts on crew performance from a location-based perspective

Abstract

Push planning and pull planning are different approaches used for production planning and control. Push planning uses predetermined dates to control a project, whereas pull planning utilizes the system’s current state. Although researchers have compared these approaches from production planning perspective to improve project performance, the differences between push and pull in construction and their impacts on crew performance and congestion have not yet been explored. Therefore, this research aims to investigate the underlying mechanisms of applying pull and push approaches at the location level through simulation, in addition to proposing hypotheses relating push and pull approaches to project and crew performance metrics. Agent-based modeling is used to simulate and describe how push and pull approaches affect crew performance. Results show that pull approaches can achieve significantly higher productivity, less idle time, lower crew turnover, and fewer task interruptions, although they can result in slightly increased project durations. Cross-analyzing the mentioned results with other performance metrics reveals that push and pull approaches should be applied together to achieve a flexible production control system. The significance of this study is embedded in exploring and understanding how the choice of push and pull planning approaches impacts the location-based management of tasks and crew performance. Such impacts on productivity, crew performance, and the flow of site operations enable a convergence to generalized conclusions regarding the efficacy of each method.