Improving productivity in design and construction of bridges

Licentiate thesis, 2023

Building new infrastructure is an essential part of developing society. The construction industry is also an important part of economic growth, accounting for 13% of the world's GDP. At the same time, the construction industry lacks behind in increasing its productivity. With more and larger infrastructure projects to be built, it is important that design and production could be performed in a more productive way. Increasing productivity is important both in terms of being more responsible with the economical and natural resources, and to be able to execute the project with the available personnel resources.

To increase productivity, this thesis focusses on standardisation of bridges. Standardisation in this thesis could be of the whole bridge, as well as standardisation of different parts of a bridge. By standardisation, the idea is that repetitive work tasks should give higher productivity as the number of similar bridges/parts increases.

This thesis examines which parameters are important to address to be able to increase productivity. It also examines how the different incentives of the three major actors' (contractor, client and design engineer) in the industry could be obstacles for increased productivity through standardisation.

The results in this thesis are based on a quantitative study consisting of a self-completed questionnaire that resulted in two appended papers. The main findings are which parameter to address to be able to increase productivity, and that the organisational structure of the contractor company could be an obstacle for long-term increased productivity.

This thesis provides further knowledge about how standardisation could increase the productivity and which incentives are important for the actors to work for this.