Generating Construction Schedules with Case-Based Reasoning Support

Current construction practice usually provides a variety of different execution alternatives for each project objective. Normally, only one possible construction schedule is selected and defined manually. Thus, decisions are often narrowed down and made at a stage where this cannot be done in a reliable way. Often it seems useful, if more than one alternative solution could be investigated. However, modeling solution alternatives is very tedious and not supported by standard solution approaches. This paper presents an approach for generating a construction schedule that includes various alternatives within a single model as well as provisions for reuse of former project experiences. The schedule can be generated on the basis of independent construction tasks. Associated constraints are formally described by the use of Feature Logic theory. Thus, a schedule can be generated automatically at any time in the process. This should lead to a higher flexibility and application of well proved solutions to problems that might occur on construction sites. In such cases, a faster reaction can be achieved by responding with predefined, tested alternatives. For practical reasons the reuse of already predefined solutions is extremely significant. Therefore, the application of case-based reasoning has been investigated for the purposes of this work. Partial construction solutions can be stored, retrieved and re-used using a case-based system.