Nebraska Risk-Informed Construction Scheduling and Impact Analysis

Assigning a reasonable contract time is central to the Nebraska Department of Transportation (NDOT)’s project delivery process. The number of working days directly affects bid prices, contractor time-related overhead, public traffic impacts, and NDOT’s construction-engineering workload. However, many NDOT projects experience time extensions or schedule adjustments. These delays often arise from weather windows, utility coordination challenges, labor or material availability issues, and unforeseen field conditions. The presence of these uncertainties means that a single deterministic duration for each activity does not adequately represent the true likelihood of early or late project completion. NDOT currently relies on deterministic schedules and historical judgment when assigning contract time. These methods assume fixed activity durations and do not fully capture the uncertainties caused by weather, utilities, material supply, labor availability, or construction sequencing constraints. As a result, some projects may receive either more contract days than needed or face unexpected time extensions that increase cost and user delay. Recent research and best practices from other state DOTs and the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) emphasize the need for probability-based scheduling that uses production-rate data, activity dependencies, and delay risk to estimate a realistic range of completion dates. The overarching goal of this project is to develop a data-driven, probability-based scheduling tool that enables NDOT to determine reasonable contract time and proactively assess construction delay risks throughout the project lifecycle.

Language

• English

Project

• Status: Programmed
• Sponsor Organizations:

  Nebraska Department of Transportation

  1500 Nebraska 2
  Lincoln, NE  United States  68502
• Project Managers:

  Halsey, Lieska

• Principal Investigators:

  Zhao, Li

  Huynh, Nathan

• Start Date: 20260701
• Expected Completion Date: 20280531
• Actual Completion Date: 0

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Construction scheduling; Risk analysis; Schedule maintenance
• Identifier Terms: Nebraska Department of Transportation
• Geographic Terms: Nebraska
• Subject Areas: Construction; Highways; Planning and Forecasting;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01991710
• Record Type: Research project
• Source Agency: Nebraska Department of Transportation
• Files: RIP, STATEDOT
• Created Date: Jun 2 2026 12:25PM