Automating Schedule Review for Expressway Construction
Publication: Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
Volume 131, Issue 1
Abstract
An expressway project is often divided into subprojects with different tendering packages, and carried out by several general contractors that apply different scheduling practices. Each schedule may contain hundreds of activities, each of which is associated with multiple pay items that determine its earned monetary value. With such huge amount of information, the reviewer can only check a sample piece of information, and the quality of review highly depends on the reviewer’s experience and devotion. Automated schedule review provides a solution to reduce such problems encountered in the industry. This paper presents a module-based schedule generation and review model, which includes a predefined set of network modules, network builder assistant computer system that helps schedulers manage and reuse the modules to build a new schedule, and another computer system network review assistant (NRA) that helps reviewers review schedules. The NRA uses generalized rule forms to represent the schedule critique knowledge collected from the industry. When potential errors are found, the NRA adopts case-based reasoning to suggest possible correction based on similar cases. The evaluation conducted by the practitioners using real projects indicates that NRA reduces review time, and provides more accurate review on finding activities and related pay items not conforming to standards, and reminding users of important but often omitted activities.
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Acknowledgments
This research was funded by National Science Council (Grant No. NSC-892211E009089), Taiwan. The writers thank their graduate student, G. L. Chang, for his careful data collection and the implementation of NRA.
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History
Received: Nov 14, 2002
Accepted: Feb 24, 2004
Published online: Jan 1, 2005
Published in print: Jan 2005
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