Construction Methods Feasibility Reasoning in an Integrated Environment

The construction technology landscape is changing at a pace far outstripping the capacities of a single decision-maker to stay current and take advantage of new and more efficient innovations. At the same time, projects are becoming more diverse and complex, underscoring the need to exploit such innovations. Also, construction companies are becoming bigger and geographically distributed. There exists a need to develop an IT infrastructure to help in the capture and transfer of hard-earned lessons on previous projects across the entire enterprise. In this paper, we present an architecture for such a system. It permits construction users to bank knowledge gained from industry sources and previous projects, and readily reuse these in formulating construction strategies for new projects. Emphasis is placed on how a number of modular data sources specifying the product and process aspects of construction projects can be loosely-coupled to allow reasoning about construction methods and the generation of an initial schedule.