Thermal environment and construction workers’ productivity: some evidence from Thailand

Abstract

Many factors have the potential to interrupt construction site work progress and to impact on workers’ productivity. Thermal environment is one of these factors that causes work to progress at different rates. This paper provides a critical summary of previous attempts to model the productivity-thermal environment relationship in construction. The paper builds upon the wealth of reported productivity data under a wide spectrum of thermal environment conditions and proposes a model for estimating productivity for three physically different construction tasks. The accuracy of the developed model estimates is then examined against data collected from four construction sites in the Northeast of Thailand.