A Knowledge Engineering Approach to Analysis and Evaluation of Construction Schedules

Abstract : A deeper understanding is needed of how owners and contractors evaluate the quality and reasonableness of construction schedules. The research described in this report contributes to this understanding by articulating a subset of scheduling principles, thus enabling models of the construction schedule evaluation process to be created for subsequent automation. This research recommends that construction schedule criticism be assigned a high project management task priority. Recognizing the importance of this task may induce large, medium, and small firms to perform formal schedule criticism, which is now done by only a few large corporations. This report provides guidelines on performing schedule criticism. Another aspect of this research is the development of prototype applications systems. These prototypes show that knowledge-based systems technology offers programming techniques that facilitate the representation and manipulation of scheduling knowledge. The infrastructure of knowledge representation schemes provided by these prototype systems will be of value during future development of an operational system. Keywords: Construction scheduling, Knowledge based system.