Third Annual
Technical Conference

Held 30 July 2025

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 video recordings from past Technical Conferences

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

Presentations and Papers

Opening Remarks

The Project Production Institute’s 3rd Annual Technical Conference addresses the industry’s unprecedented challenges as AI-driven infrastructure demands create a $12-15 trillion capital spending surge over five years, while critical shortages of skilled labor, engineers, and equipment materials intensify with lead times extending to 5-7 years for essential components like gas turbines. The conference emphasizes that achieving “more with less” through Project Production Ma...

An Integrated Approach to Project Production System Optimization

It is well documented that capital projects continue to experience cost and schedule overruns, while owners whether business or government and their contractors experience the consequences. Driven by digital transformation, the associated need for energy and the necessity to build new or replace existing civil infrastructure while dealing with a declining skilled labor market it is easy to see how things can only get worse. At the root of the project cost and schedule overrun problem are the nev...

Application of Computer-Aided Production Engineering to Project Production

The demand for construction continues to grow year after year, putting more pressure on the global value chain. Construction labor shortages worldwide, even across OEMs and Integrators that supply construction, makes us question if modular and off-site construction are really solving the manpower issue or just moving it somewhere else. Compounding this situation, and knowingly or unknowingly, the ongoing advocacy of project and construction management practices has pushed project practitioners, ...

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

The global transition to net-zero emissions demands clean energy technologies that can operate at scale and cost parity with fossil fuels. However, most clean energy projects suffer from commercial unviability, technological inefficiencies, and geopolitical supply chain complexities, resulting in failures at Final Investment Decision (FID) gates. This paper examines how First Principles Thinking (FPT), combined with Project Production Management (PPM) and Operations Science (OS), can address the...

NEST: Accelerating and De-Risking Innovation in Construction

NEST at EMPA operates as Switzerland’s revolutionary innovation laboratory that serves as a real-world testing ground for construction technologies, demonstrating how the industry can “do more with less” through rapid prototyping, circular construction methods, and digital fabrication solutions. This living ecosystem enables over 200 research and industry partners to collaborate in bridging the critical valley of death between innovation and market deployment, featuring fully d...

Co-Creating a Shared Understanding About Systems Thinking in The Built Environment

Addressing society’s evolving needs requires tackling interconnected issues – climate change, resource depletion, pollution, and biodiversity loss – simultaneously. The built environment’s longevity and interdependence demand strategic, long-term, and integrated governance. Yet siloed structures in government, regulation, and industry, along with fragmented data, hinder progress and obscure the insights needed to improve outcomes. Without urgent action, we risk cascading system failures, economi...

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. ...

Mass Timber As An Advanced Building Material: A Solution to Industrialized Supply Chains

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. M...

An Operations Science and Production System Optimization-Based Approach to Evaluate Implementation of Robotic Wastewater Testing Platform in China

Timely and accurate wastewater chemical testing in wastewater treatment plants is essential to confirm compliance with environmental standards and to correct operational problems. In China, trained laboratory analysts manually perform the sampling and testing tasks required by regulations. However, with increasingly stringent environmental regulations and growing complexity in testing protocols, laboratories in these facilities are experiencing capacity constraints. While switching to robotic te...

Measuring What Matters: Operations Science as a Foundation for Modern KPIs in Capital Projects

Capital projects consistently underperform despite advancements in planning, digital tools, and enterprise reporting. One key contributor is the continued reliance of conventional metrics, originally designed for administrative oversight, to manage and control production. These metrics fail to reflect the true nature of execution: variability, flow, bottlenecks, and system dynamics. This paper proposes an alternative measurement framework based on Operations Science (OS). Drawing from proven pri...

Effect of Variable-Scope Work Packages on Project Contingencies and Other Production-Related Risk Indicators

This paper investigates how variability in the scope of construction work packages—particularly size-based differences in arrival and service times—affects project performance metrics like completion time, work-in-process (WIP), and cycle time (CT). Using discrete event simulation (DES), the study compares traditional M/M/1 queue behavior with more realistic production systems exhibiting scope-induced correlations with the goal of delivering analytical heuristics for DES results. Due to the tran...

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 ra...

Build Boldly: Integrating Operations Science and the Last Planner System®

Capital projects often suffer from significant cost overruns and schedule delays. These issues are frequently caused by poor early alignment, fragmented communication, and a lack of understanding of how production flows impact project performance, leading to high-stress environments and jeopardized profits. Therefore, this study showcases how a Hospital project in California can overcome these industry challenges through a pioneering blend of Operations Science (OS) and the Last Planner System® ...

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

The construction industry faces a growing labor shortage, particularly in skilled trades, leading to increased costs and operational risks. Raise Robotics addresses this challenge with a modular robotic platform designed to automate high-risk, repetitive tasks on construction sites. By initially focusing on building envelope construction, the company demonstrated the value of its system in reducing schedule delays, cost overruns, and safety risks. Real-world deployments have validated its approa...

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

Boreal Energy Systems addresses North America’s exponential electricity demand growth through factory-built micromodular reactors that deliver 1-5 megawatts of clean power with dramatically compressed deployment timelines. The solution tackles critical infrastructure gaps where traditional nuclear plants require decade-plus delivery while data centers, transportation electrification, and hydrogen production drive unprecedented demand growth, creating a fundamental mismatch between grid con...

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

Current construction management techniques center around the ‘iron triangle’ of scope/quality, schedule, and resource use, with the common understanding that only two of these three aspects can be optimized in a project. On the other hand, the Project Production Institute (PPI) advocates an Operations Science-based approach to managing projects using five levers invalidating the iron triangle. Those levers are product design, process design, capacity, inventory, and variability. Current methods ...

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 maxi...

Closing Remarks

The Project Production Institute’s technical conference showcased significant industry progress in adopting production management principles, with strong academic partnerships yielding high-quality research presentations from prior PPI award recipients. Educational pathways include Stanford’s intensive six-month Modern Construction Program focused on rapid organizational transformation and hands-on project problem-solving, alongside Texas A&M’s NextGen Project Management c...

Participating Organizations

PPI thanks participating organizations for their contributions to the Technical Conference over the years. 

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