The linear planning is a graphical scheduling method over time and distance focusing on continuous resource utilization in repetitive activities.
The linear method of planning is often referred to by different names, Linear Scheduling Method (LSM), Time Distance Diagrams, Time Location Diagrams, French Diagrams and or March Charts.
TILOS (TIme LOcation System) is a linear planning and scheduling software system that provides a very powerful graphical and a fully capable scheduling engine. TILOS was originally developed about 10 years ago in Germany. This system is currently used by more than 250 organizations in Europe, Africa, Australia and North America for railway, tunnel, pipeline and road projects.
Linear planning presents construction challenges such as maintaining crew separation, equipment being moved around, permits, land acquisition and crossings. Ideally, you would want to resolve any land and permit issues before construction begins and then sequentially start your crews using different lags to reduce the total time in construction while preventing one crew catching up to another.
Traditional scheduling tools such as Asta Powerproject, Microsoft Project® or Primavera® do very little for planning and executing construction engineering projects. The issue is that these tools don’t show you which part of the project has been completed, where the crews are in relation to each other and what other factors are important to the successful completion of the project.
TILOS has a cell based structure with at least one main time-distance cell (although there can be more than one) and any number of other cells that contain distance type of information (elevation, alignment sheets, crossing lists, etc.), time cells (resources, spend profiles, profits etc.) and other cells such as calendar and distance scales. Each TILOS project starts with two views, the project view and a Gantt chart. You can define as many views as you need to display your project: typically, views for the overall project and one for each section of the project (especially those sections where there are construction bottleneck issues such as crossings and environmental restrictions).