Third Annual
Technical Conference

30 July 2025 - Virtual

The Project Production Institute hosted its Third Annual Technical Conference on Wednesday 30 July 2025. This annual event brings together industry experts, academics and thought leaders to explore cutting-edge solutions, methodologies, and technologies driving technical advancements and innovation in project delivery.

The primary objective of the conference is to discuss and address the root cause of major capital project cost and schedule overruns via research, discussion and dissemination of Project Production Management (PPM) and its foundation of Operations Science. This conference advances research, education, knowledge and practical application of PPM through the presentation of papers and exchange of ideas between industry and academia. Specifically, this conference focuses on how to solve impactful problems and address technical challenges in three key sectors: Energy, Digital Infrastructure and Civil Infrastructure.

In support of this, PPI invites practitioners and academics to submit technical abstracts for consideration and presentation at the upcoming conference. Participants submit an abstract that focuses on one of the following research categories: Theory (specifically related to Operations Science), Model (the application of simulations, digital twins, robotics, autonomous, IoT, AI / ML) or Control (the use of various systems, protocols, methods and tools that are used to control Project Production Systems). Learn more about PPI’s research here.

Access papers, transcripts and video recordings from past Technical Conferences

1st Annual Technical Conference Presentations
2nd Annual Technical Conference Presentations

Paper Presentations

Recordings and papers will be published here in the coming weeks. Be sure to join our mailing list to be notified.

Beyond Subsidies: Creating Competitive Clean Energy Solutions by Rethinking Design and Delivery Through the Application of First Principles Thinking and Project Production Management

Accelerating and De-Risking Innovation in the Built Environment with NEST

Connect to Change: Unlocking the Value of Systems Thinking in the Built Environment

The Hidden Biases in Production Planning: Why Our Estimates Are Flawed from the Start

A good project plan is not a guarantee for success, but a bad project plan is always a guarantee for failure. Effective project planning relies on a combination of activity-based (work breakdown structures, critical path analyses, etc.) and object-based (flow, critical chain, advanced work packaging, etc.) approaches. However, a critical yet often-overlooked challenge in either approach is the inherent estimation error, which leads to flawed models, unrealistic schedules, and erratic workflows. Systematically, we underestimate both task durations and the variability of those durations, resulting in overly optimistic projections that fail to capture the complexities of the real world.

Mass Timber as an Advanced Building Material: A Solution to Industrialized Supply Chains and Tariffs

As the construction industry faces compounded challenges—labor shortages, rising material costs, inefficient supply chains, and the climate crisis—mass timber emerges as a compelling solution. Mass timber, as a forestry product, provides a sustainable solution to supply chain challenges and tariff impacts in construction. Produced off-site, it reduces labor, shortens construction time, and decreases transportation costs. Local sourcing strengthens supply chain resilience and reduces emissions. Mass timber offers an alternative to imported materials like steel and concrete, mitigating tariff-induced cost increases. As a renewable resource, mass timber also reduces the carbon footprint of construction, offering a durable, fire-resistant, and environmentally friendly option, fostering building projects’ circularity.

This paper proposes an industrialized supply chain model that directly links forest products to the construction industry. This paper proposes an Industrialized Supply Chain (ISC) model that leverages mass timber to address supply chain disruptions and tariff impacts while fostering regional economic resilience, reducing embodied carbon, and enhancing productivity in housing construction. Through stakeholder integration, digitalization, and an end to end supply strategy, the ISC model outlines a future-forward path for the nation’s built environment. By integrating sustainably sourced timber and advanced products like CLT and Glulam, the model reduces inefficiencies, improves sustainability, and strengthens local economies, promoting a circular approach.

Keywords: Industrialized Supply Chain; Mass Timber, Timber Construction; Housing

Adopting A Robotic Testing Platform in Wastewater Treatment Facilities: Applying Operations Science and Discrete Event Simulation to Optimize Operations and Inform Automation Investment

Measuring What Matters: OS as a Foundation for Modern KPIs

What is your Rationale and Approach for Investing in Industrialized Construction?

Industrialized construction (IC) means many things to many people. It is a concept that has been rediscovered time and again. In recent years, interest in IC has been sparked anew thanks to the promise of increasingly affordable automation, readily available cloud computing, and AI driving innovation in our industry. While jumping on the bandwagon now may be more tempting than ever, individual companies—producers or investors—will want to articulate their rationale for moving towards IC. This rationale will determine what investments are suitable for their circumstances. To illustrate, this paper describes three companies that invested in IC, pursuing a variety of rationales and achieving different levels of success. Acquiring hardware tends to be the easy part. It must be warranted by the company’s production system design(s) founded on operations science principles, and accompanied by people’s know-how and ways of working (company culture and processes). A takeaway from the literature and interviews conducted for this paper is that production system design and operations science are seldom mentioned, yet these are crucially important for company success especially when counting on IC to improve production system performance.

Scalable Robotic Automation for Multi-Scope Construction Tasks in an Evolving Labor Market

Factory to Site: How Industrialized Micro Modular Reactors Can Deliver Clean, Reliable Power

A Framework for Product-Process Integrated Analysis of Construction Operations Using DES and BIM

Computer Vision Model to Extract Production Data for Slab Concrete Pouring from Site Video Using YOLOv8

Construction teams in fast-cycle cast-in-place concrete work currently lack access to real-time and automated raw production data, including start and end time, the number and location of labor and equipment as resources, limiting their ability to efficiently and effectively model and control production. Without such data, construction teams are unable to make real-time decisions such as identifying delays and bottlenecks, creating and adjusting the best possible composition of the crews to maximize resource utilization and meet the target completion dates for activities, and efficiently reallocating labor and equipment during dynamic site operations. This research proposes a vision-based model that extracts raw production data (start and end time) from video footage to support real-time, data-driven production system modeling and control in cast-in-place concrete work.

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