34th Annual Conference of the International Group for Lean Construction (IGLC 34) - Singapore, Singapore - 2026

https://doi.org/10.24928/2026/0162

Semantic Blindness in Digital LPS Systems

Raquel H. Reck1 & Eduardo L. Isatto2

1PhD and Lean Consultant at Climb Consulting Group, Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil, +55 51 998711561, [email protected], orcid.org/0000-0003-1928-3461.
2Associate Professor, School of Engineering, Building Innovation Research Unit (NORIE), Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Porto Alegre, Brazil, [email protected], orcid.org/0000-0002-0851-8790

Abstract

Digital tools supporting the Last Planner System (LPS) have expanded rapidly over the past years, encompassing BIM-based planning platforms and constraint ontologies. Although the LPS has demonstrated improvements in production reliability and coordination, evidence of sustained and comparable performance across projects remains limited. Rather than attributing this gap to insufficient data or computational capability, this study suggests it is also associated with how production information is structured and maintained across planning cycles. The study presents a qualitative comparative analysis of 12 digital LPS-related systems reported in the literature between 1999 and 2025. Four representational dimensions are examined: work package definition; representation of location, process, and scope; capture of progress and constraints; and recording of deviations and their causes. The results show that these systems effectively represent operational aspects of production, such as tasks, quantities, timestamps, and execution states, but provide limited support for preserving the contextual and decision-related information required to reuse and compare commitments across planning levels. This paper identifies a structural representational limitation in digital LPS systems — termed semantic blindness — defined as the inability to maintain and reuse contextual and decision-related information across planning levels.

Keywords

Last Planner® System, semantic representation, work package, data reuse.

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Reference in APA 7th edition format:

Reck, R. H. & Isatto, E. L.. (2026). Semantic Blindness in Digital LPS Systems. In Hamzeh, F., Poshdar, M., & Garcia-Lopez,, N. P. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 34th Annual Conference of the International Group for Lean Construction (IGLC 34) (pp. 26–37). https://doi.org/10.24928/2026/0162

Shortened reference for use in IGLC papers:

Reck, R. H. & Isatto, E. L.. (2026). Semantic Blindness in Digital LPS Systems. IGLC34. https://doi.org/10.24928/2026/0162

 

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