Lean Construction in Road Projects

By far civil engineering represents one of the fields with lower productivity. This fact can be explained by a number of reasons, such as the lack of standardization in their projects, insufficient attention to building details or inadequate automation. The Lean approach stands as a management method aiming to reduce all project wastes leading to higher productivities and lower costs. Since the introduction of this concept after WWII, this has been successfully implemented into a number of disciplines, such as industrial or the aerospace engineering. Nevertheless, because of its peculiarities, the application to the civil engineering field is not as straightforward. Among the civil engineering, the road projects stand as one of the most economically and environmentally costly. For this reason, special attention to increase the productivity and to reduce the cost of this kind of projects is required. To fill this gap, this paper reviews the current state of the art of the application of the lean approach for the management of road projects. This review will present the main contributions of this approach in the road management field to encourage scholars and practitioners the use of this methodology.