A Conceptual Framework of Quality-Assured Fabrication, Delivery and Installation Processes for Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) Plant Construction

Construction productivity issues in the Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) construction industry can lead to project cost blowouts. Time wasted by construction personnel getting the right information on megaprojects can be a substantial contributing factor. It appears that the communication on site is not cost effective, judging by the number of large project that have experienced budget overruns in the past. More importantly, as-built design documentation often fails the quality test, resulting in operational inefficiencies once the plant has been handed over from Construction to Operation Phase. Common errors during the static prefabrication, dispatch and installation processes can result in serious rework as a significant amount of construction time and budget is wasted. To minimise these problems, this paper recommends to better control the dynamic natures of construction. This study propagates a conceptual framework for assuring quality of modular construction in LNG plants by introducing a Situation Awareness construction environment with well-defined sensing and tracking technologies. While encountering situations inconsistent with plans during construction, such as time delay, fabrication errors, conflicts in terms of accessibility and constructability issues and so forth, sensors mounted in situ can discover such situations and recursively fed back to field personnel. Automation and robotics technologies, such as real-time path planning, collision detection and deviation examination utilizing as-planned building information model, can assist engineers to rapidly react with inconsistent situations and make acceptable decisions instead of partially or entirely suspending the workforce through massive reworks. In this study, we conduct a preliminary study in demonstrating the feasibility of utilizing sensory devices and automatic planning technologies. The expected results of adopting the framework are the quality-assured modular construction and execution plans during construction stages to save rework construction time and budget.