Linear Planning in Pipeline Construction
A case study how to use TILOS in pipeline industry for scheduling and controlling construction works.

Pipeline construction, as with other linear projects; presents construction challenges such as maintaining crew separation, equipment move arounds, permitting, land acquisition and crossings. Ideally, you want to resolve any land and permitting issues before construction begins and then sequentially start your crews using different lags to reduce the total time in construction while preventing one crew catching up to another.

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Traditional planning methods
Traditional scheduling tools such as Microsoft Project or Primavera do very little for planning and executing pipeline construction if you want to consider these construction issues. Each task, the start and end date and the physical percent complete are readily displayed using these tools. If we look at Figure 1 (below), we can see that grading is about 18% complete, welding about 13% complete etc. Anyone familiar with these tools can easily extract this sort of information. The issue is that these tools don’t show us which part of the project has been completed, where the crews are in relation to each other and what other factors are important to the successful completion of the project.

Figure 1. Pipeline Schedule in Primavera

Alternative planning methods
Many field construction managers and field engineers have traditionally created their own version of time distance charts by simply marking daily progress of each crew on the alignment sheets or drawing time distance charts with pen/paper, in Excel or in AutoCAD. These techniques very readily provide a graphical representation of progress, in relation to right-of-way