Might Ant Algorithms Improve Project Performance?
July 26th, 2006 by HalLook to the world of ants to understand how construction can evolve.
Swarm intelligence and Ant Colony Approach for Applied in Optimizing Construction Process
Fritz Gehbauer, et al
The LPS® is a self-learning system. The central principle of a swarm is self-organization and following strict rules.
Use a few simple rules throughout the planning process.
Nature inspires design of the built environment and of machines. From a swarm we can learn to:
- Provide immediate rewards for results
- Provide immediate and frequent measurement
- Provide individual measurements
Use ant algorithms at various points of planning. For instance, sequence planning could be influenced by using a few simple rules consistently throughout the planning process. We'll get to find out. The authors have an experiment underway that they will report on next year.
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July 26th, 2006 at 3:08 pm
Great post, Hal. The other great thing about ants (and I use this analogy a lot when I talk about systems thinking) is their inherent understanding of roles and responsibilities. Each ant knows what his task is, and he performs it unwaveringly. He doesn’t question the performance of another ant, try to tell it how to do its job, get all territorial over perceptions, or undermine another ant. It may sound a little Fred-Taylor-esque but it does work for them. If our project teams better understood the concept of clear role/responsibility breakdown and had stronger leaders to slot the right people into those roles. As usual, though, your comments are thought-provoking and well-structured.
July 28th, 2006 at 12:01 am
We’ve been doing a lot of work with our clients lately to define roles, let alone restructure roles. Our basic approach is to first locate people in a business process. Then we create an accountability — ongoing commitment to care for something — as the starting out description of their role. When people have clear accountabilities that are well communicated within the team and the organization we find there is far less mischief and miscoordination.