/tilos/tilos-for-water-and-sewerage/
Trunk main and sewer renewal schemes are linear in exactly the same sense a railway is: a pipe route with a start and an end, chambers and manholes at fixed intervals, and site constraints — traffic management, road crossings, environmental permits — that apply to specific stretches, not the whole scheme.
Why water and sewerage schemes need time-location scheduling
A utilities scheme’s biggest scheduling risk is usually a fixed point along the route — a live road crossing, a watercourse, a section next to a school — where working hours or methods are restricted. A Gantt chart treats the whole activity as one bar with one rate; a time-location chart shows the rate actually change as the crew passes through that constrained stretch, which is exactly the behaviour a realistic schedule needs to capture.
What the chart above shows
Excavation & shoring, followed by pipe laying, progress down a 6 km trunk sewer. Manhole chambers are marked at regular intervals along the chainage axis — useful reference points for site teams reading the chart. A shaded band marks a restricted-hours road crossing: both activity lines visibly flatten as they pass through it, showing the real production-rate impact rather than hiding it inside an averaged duration.
Typical constraints TILOS helps you plan around
- Restricted working hours at live road or rail crossings
- Environmental permit windows near watercourses or protected sites
- Access sequencing where excavation, pipe laying and reinstatement can’t all occupy the same short stretch at once
- Coordinating with other utilities sharing the same corridor
Who uses this
- Planners scheduling excavation, pipe-laying and reinstatement crews
- Project managers tracking overall completion against permit deadlines
- Risk managers monitoring exposure at fixed constraint points along the route
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