Manpower Allocation of Work Activities for Producing Precast Components: Empirical Study in Taiwan

The production of precast components in the construction industry is a labor-intensive process. The objectives of this study are to prove the feasibility of using rough set theory to classify and weigh impact attributes, and to develop a model to assess the total quantities of labor needed for precast structural elements using a rough set enhanced K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN). Three main building components (beams, girders, and columns) were collected from the production of precast elements in Taiwan. After trimming and analyzing the basic data, the rough set approach is used to classify and weight the attributes into three levels of impact based on their frequency. A rough set enhanced KNN is accordingly developed, yielding an accuracy rate of 92.36%, which is 8.09% higher than the result obtained when using the KNN algorithm. A practical and effective prediction model would assist managers to estimate the manpower requirement of precast projects.