Virtual Booth

Preparing a preliminary roadwork tender programme requires users to identify suitable activities, arrange construction sequences, estimate timing, recognise overlaps, and convert the schedule into a clear Gantt chart. These tasks can be difficult for civil engineering students and novice tender preparers who often begin with a blank schedule and have limited experience with specialised planning software. RoadPlan Lite was therefore developed as a browser-based, rule-based digital teaching and preliminary planning aid that converts project information, contract duration, project type, and selected work components into an editable activity schedule and graphical Gantt chart through a guided process. The prototype supports road upgrading, road rehabilitation, and road resurfacing projects. Its novelty lies in combining roadwork-specific activity selection, embedded percentage-based timing rules, automatic start and finish-week calculations, editable scheduling, custom activity addition, immediate Gantt visualisation, and print-ready output within one accessible application. A preliminary convenience pilot involving six (6) undergraduate students and one (1) lecturer achieved full task completion, a combined usability and educational-value rating of 4.73 out of 5, and overall experience ratings of good or very good from all respondents. RoadPlan Lite benefits society by supporting practical construction-planning education, reducing the blank-page barrier, and helping novice users prepare a structured first draft for preliminary tender discussions. Its commercialisation potential includes institutional teaching licences, customised templates for universities, contractors, and government agencies, and future premium modules for quantity-based scheduling, activity dependencies, costing, online project saving, and advanced CPM, resource, and reporting functions.