AN INTEGRATED TOOL FOR MANAGING CONSTRUCTION WORKS IN CIVIL ENGINEERING: APPLICATION TO BREAKWATERS

Among the civil engineering disciplines, the correct management of the construction procedures is essential to succeed during the construction of any civil engineering infrastructure. Although significant improvements in recent decades have resulted in new formulations and methods for the safety design of the structures and to minimize impacts and costs, they are generally focused on the life-cycle. On the other hand, the magnitudes and volumes of the civil projects are large-scale and encompass multiple works, which are linked and superimposed. This implies a great difficulty in innovating and developing new learning mechanisms that improve, optimize and allow assimilating the complete constructive process of a civil infrastructure. For these reasons, the traditional approach of the educational sector tends to provide a general overview of the construction works, without detailing each sub-task, repair/maintenance or possible shutdowns during the construction. As a consequence, in many cases the students are not properly prepared for the job opportunity in this matter.

Consequently, in this work we developed an educational-oriented tool that integrates the overall construction process of civil engineering infrastructures. It was applied to the case of breakwaters as a relevant example of a highly complex infrastructure, but the extension to other cases is straightforward. The tool includes the advance per hour of each section of the infrastructure (executed volume, loss volume due to storm, advanced length and performance data), as well as the feedback in the event of damage and stoppage as a result of a storm. In addition, the tool can be used to evaluate the impact of the construction process on the project/work budget. In order to develop this tool in a programming language both easy to handle and extensively employed in work environments and research, we adopted the Python language. This innovative educational methodology will mean not only an advance in the student's learning of the complete construction process of a civil engineering infrastructure, but it will also involve the incorporation of new teaching methods, which will allow the students to interact with the structure as if it were a real case.