CONSTRUCTABILITY IMPROVEMENT OF HIGHWAY PROJECTS IN WASHINGTON. FINAL REPORT

The ever-increasing amount of construction problems and unnecessary redesigning work during the construction phase of highway projects with the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) has prompted studies into improving constructability. This report presents the development of a model constructability review procedure and the Highway Constructability Improvement System (HCIS), and demonstrates the use of the system by a design engineer. The information in HCIS is mainly extracted from a critical search of thousands of change orders from five recent years of WSDOT highway construction projects. By the use of HCIS, engineers at the design office can have access to a bank of knowledge from past construction experiences and be alerted to the constructability aspects of their designs. This allows the design engineers to be aware of what had gone wrong in the past, and avoid repeating similar errors in preparing future design plans and specifications. This will improve constructability of designs at an early stage of a project. The user does not have to refer to other sources for reference while using the system. It is concluded that in order to avoid similar highway constructability problems, a pre-construction and post-construction review of the project, such as reviewing change orders, is very useful and important. The model constructability review process is a way to standardize the different procedures currently being used by each district. By adopting the standard procedure, the occurrence of commonly shared problems can be reduced to a minimum to achieve a consistency of construction quality in Washington.