Arena-based queue simulation for improving delivery process management in housing development projects
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Abstract
The delivery process in housing development projects exhibits queuing system characteristics, where delays directly affect customer satisfaction. This study investigated and analyzed delivery process management across four housing development projects in Bangkok and its metropolitan areas, using real data collected from 74 housing units over 12 months (January-December 2022). The primary objectives were to identify key problems and delay factors, and to evaluate improvement strategies through queueing theory-based simulation. Data analysis revealed that the main problems stem from end-of-quarter concentration of property bookings and transfers, combined with insufficient subcontractor numbers and unbalanced workload distribution, resulting in an average customer waiting time of 8.64 days and an average total time in system of 33.14 days per unit. This study applied Arena Discrete-Event Simulation (DES) with 500 replications to test two improvement scenarios: Scenario 1 — increasing the number of subcontractors from 2 to 3, and Scenario 2 — segmenting customers and subcontractors based on work complexity. Simulation results showed that Scenario 1 reduced average waiting time to 2.86 days and total system time to 25.48 days. Scenario 2 produced superior outcomes, reducing value-added activity duration to 18.14 days and total time in system to 24.51 days, while balancing subcontractor utilization at 9.94% and 9.87% respectively, with total inspection costs remaining constant at 75,000 Baht. The findings demonstrate that customer segmentation with specialized subcontractor assignment outperforms simply adding resources, and the simulation framework can be applied to other real estate projects with similar operational characteristics.
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