The Use of Operational Models to Evaluate Construction Staging Plans, A Case Study

Construction staging has traditionally been a process of identifying the critical “measured” demand and designing staging plans to ensure that sufficient capacity exists within the construction zone to meet that measured demand. A more robust approach would take into account the true demand and consider the flow of traffic as a system with various interactions at work. Operational simulation models meet these needs and permit the analysis of dynamic, time-sensitive traffic phenomena, where vehicles travel though the network and interact with each other in response to various roadway characteristics and conditions.
This paper presents a case study of a construction staging project, based upon a four-step methodology that incorporates both traffic engineering analysis and the development of operational simulation models to evaluate construction staging plans. This process was able to clearly distinguish between two alternative construction staging schemes. This demonstrates that using a well-defined simulation model can achieve an accurate and reliable method for evaluating construction staging plans.
A unique aspect of the study was a trial field evaluation of both proposals, which provided the opportunity to verify both methodology and analysis results. Results for the trial validated both the simulations and the traffic engineering evaluation, many of the conclusions, and provided some insight into travel behavior.