Pro-Active Allocation of Project Requirements through Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Project Information System Integration

Effective project requirement management is one of the significant tasks for the success of project planning and execution in complicated and dynamic construction environments. For improved requirement management, it is recommended to identify and allocate project requirements at an early stage prior to construction for appropriate project progress monitoring and control with little effort and cost. Current requirement allocation practices rely heavily on time-consuming and error-prone manual processes due to a sheer volume of free-formatted project documents and the necessity of practitioners’ judgment based on their experience and expertise. This paper aims to propose a systematic approach to assigning and clarifying project requirements to appropriate project parties. The proposed approach employs natural language processing (NLP) technique to automatically assign project requirements to responsible project parties. The allocated requirements are then incorporated into project geographical information system to present associated project requirements along with geo-spatial information. By integrating the information system with classified project requirements through NLP techniques, pro-active requirement allocation will further facilitate both managing of a variety of requirements and the real-time dissemination of them to all project parties.