Towards identifying patterns in engineering documents to aid project planning

The increasing complexity of current engineering projects causes uncertainty for project execution, and creates challenges for project design and management. To attempt to reuse the information of previously completed projects for current project planning, this paper introduces the definition of the “Engineering Document Pattern” (EDP), and proposes some EDP identification methods. EDP is really a form of knowledge and activity representation and as an approach is suitable for representing large scale projects, and can potentially be used to help decision makers understand the initial requirements and potential risks of current projects. The experimental study evaluates the EDP identification methods by analysing and profile some completed In-Service design repair reports, and the result shows the identified EDPs accurately represent the report-related project characteristics.