Simulation practitioners in construction often experience difficulties in d
eveloping simulation models, i.e., tediousness and error-proneness. The vis
ual environment presented in this paper gives users user-friendly support t
hroughout the entire simulation development process, with the provision of
a visual modeling interface, easy-to-use icon animation, and dynamic statis
tics. Under the visual modeling interface, modeling construction operations
is completed through editing activity-based graphics as the standard graph
ic editing tools do, and no programming is required. An easy-to-use animati
on can facilitate communication between the simulation model and users, and
assist users in verification and validation of the simulation model. Inste
ad of creating 3-D images with adequate skills and much time, this animatio
n takes the graphic simulation model as the background images and the pre-c
reated 2-D iconic images as moving objects, in order that the preparing for
animation is simple. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.