Capturing Implicit Structures in Unstructured Content of Construction Documents

In a paper-based paradigm, whether construction information is presented in structured or unstructured format is not a critical issue because human beings are good at processing both types of information. However, the paradigm shift from using paper-based media to electronic media requires better handling of unstructured information, as a computer is more adept at processing structured information. It is observed by the writers that many existing information systems in the construction industry simply mimic paper-based construction documents, not just in presentations but also in data structures, such as request for information (RFI) forms developed by many existing software vendors. The writers thus question whether enough attention has been put into understanding the impact of the paradigm shift on data management for construction documents. This paper argues that a construction document such as a RFI is usually used by construction professionals to serve particular business purposes, which restricts the content of such a document. Consequently, some types of unstructured information make references implicitly or explicitly to certain types of information that are often well structured such as building or project management information. Further, the occurrence of such cross references is constant and stable among different instances of the same type of documents. A major challenge is to properly capture, represent, and utilize such knowledge in order to improve information processing for construction professionals. Text analysis and statistical analysis are applied by this study to determine the patterns of the occurrences for certain types of concepts that are related to building components, contract documents, or project management in unstructured content. With the identified patterns, this paper further discusses the potential use of metadata models as a method to support processing unstructured content in those documents.     

Automated Classification of Construction Project Documents

The number of documents generated in a construction project and stored in interorganizational information systems is significant. Since a large percentage of these project documents are generated in text format, methods for organizing and improving access to the information contained in these types of documents become essential to construction information management. Information classification schemes can be used for this purpose. They provide a common framework to enact document organization and information exchange among project members. Current systems for document management rely on manual classification methods controlled by human experts. Due to the widespread use of information technologies for construction, the increasing availability of electronic documents, and the development of systems based on project object models, manual classification becomes unfeasible. This paper presents a unique way to improve information organization and access in interorganizational systems based on automated classification of construction project documents according to their related project components. Machine learning methods were used for this purpose. A prototype of a document classification system was developed to provide easy deployment and scalability to the classification process.     

Measuring Relevance in Support of Design Reuse from Archives of Building Product Models

This paper investigates the use of text analysis techniques to measure relevance between objects in product models. This relevance measure is used to support design reuse from an archive of product models from previous projects. We consider several techniques from the field of information retrieval for comparing documents. Next, we explore whether we can improve the performance of the relevance measure by considering contextual building model elements. The paper concludes with an evaluation and discussion of the techniques considered. We conclude that relatively good retrieval results can be achieved with short texts and sparse building models such as those that occur in current industry practice.     

Multimodal Image Retrieval from Construction Databases and Model-Based Systems

In the modern and dynamic construction environment it is important to access information in a fast and efficient manner in order to improve the decision making processes for construction managers. This capability is, in most cases, straightforward with today’s technologies for data types with an inherent structure that resides primarily on established database structures like estimating and scheduling software. However, previous research has demonstrated that a significant percentage of construction data is stored in semi-structured or unstructured data formats (text, images, etc.) and that manually locating and identifying such data is a very hard and time-consuming task. This paper focuses on construction site image data and presents a novel image retrieval model that interfaces with established construction data management structures. This model is designed to retrieve images from related objects in project models or construction databases using location, date, and material information (extracted from the image content with pattern recognition techniques).     

Action Research as a Proactive Research Method for Construction Engineering and Management

Academic research in applied disciplines such as construction engineering and management (CEM) has the dual mission of simultaneously contributing to the solution of practical problems and creating theoretical and conceptual knowledge. To do so, appropriate research approaches are needed. However, extant literature in the field has paid little attention to this issue and research methods used have been almost entirely either quantitative surveys or case studies. In this paper, action research (AR) is proposed as an answer to this knowledge gap. AR aims at building and testing theory within the context of solving an immediate practical problem in a real setting. The paper describes the underlying philosophy and application procedure of AR and highlights its strengths and weaknesses. Then, the applicability of the method to CEM is illustrated through a case study of improving access to information to support planning and decision making in a construction owner organization through designing and implementing a data warehouse. The findings indicate that AR is a reliable, structured, and rigorous research approach that is very useful for conducting applied research in construction and enabling academia to influence and improve construction industry practices. It can also effectively help to improve collaboration between academic researchers and industry practitioners in research and development projects.     

Knowledge Mining of Information Sources for Research in Construction Management

Extracting the right information at the right time is vital in any research project. Moreover, researchers generally seek innovative “knowledge mining” techniques for optimizing their research efforts within constrained time frames and with scarce resources. Meanwhile, rapid developments in the fields of computing and information technology drive the accelerated globalization process in both industry and academia. This paper explores some of the emerging technologies and associated research methodologies from an information supply chain perspective. An application in a recent Internet based two-phase questionnaire survey for design/build contractor selection provides a useful case study in the structuring of an innovative knowledge mining strategy. This experience feeds into the formulation of a “high-velocity” knowledge mining framework and a set of guidelines—to facilitate and enhance such innovative construction management research, while dealing with some initial issues/problems in the Internet based research environment. Furthermore, some critical success factors, key performance indicators, and mining strategies are consolidated for marshalling both vivid and tacit knowledge sources, such as by “exploiting” Internet resources for more creative and efficient construction management research.     

A New Approach to Effective Use of Design Rationale in Practice

Documentation of design rationale (DR) has great potential for improving the quality of design and construction. Yet 30 years of research has failed to make use of DR practical in real-world projects. This failure is above all due to the costs and disruption associated with capturing and structuring of the DR. We propose here a new approach to avoid the necessity for a separate capture-and-structuring phase. Instead, our approach takes advantage of three crucial features of the documents used in everyday practice. First, these documents contain large amounts of useful rationale. Second, these documents are prepared and often received in machine-readable form—or can easily be converted to such a form. The third feature—and the central subject of this paper—is that the terminology used in these documents provides a surprisingly reliable basis for retrieval of rationale from them. Together these three features imply that simple methods of free-text search could be used in conjunction with modern networked computing to retrieve relevant rationale from documents located anywhere within an organization.     

Teaching Construction Contracts: Mutual Learning Experience

Construction contract modules are delivered to second-year architectural technology and construction/construction management students undertaking foundation and undergraduate degree programs. Feedback and assessment results from recent years showed that students generally found these modules difficult. Studies were conducted to further understand students’ experiences and expectations, to assess quality of teaching, and to evaluate the dissemination of theoretical and practical knowledge during the delivery of construction contract modules. The objective was to review the methods used for teaching, learning, and assessment of construction contract modules and make recommendations to inform and improve future module development and delivery. This paper is based on a first-time experience of teaching a law-related subject to construction students. Reflection on the teaching and assessment methods implemented during the term and on student responses permits conclusions to be drawn on how best to improve students’ learning experience and simultaneously maintain the university’s quality standards.     

Ontology-Based Approach to Context Representation and Reasoning for Managing Context-Sensitive Construction Information

The construction industry is an information-intensive industry and heavily relies on documents, including physical and virtual documentation and models, to exchange context-sensitive information among different project participants. Many research efforts have been made to help manage construction information; however, few of them considered the context-sensitive nature of the information. In this paper, the writers propose a new approach to facilitate the management of context-sensitive construction information that is stored in different textual documents. The approach addresses the context-sensitive nature of construction information by representing contexts in ontologies and by using contexts as indices of the information. The approach also presents a reasoning mechanism that leverages the semantically rich features of ontologies to reason about contexts to evaluate their applicabilities. Two case studies were conducted, and the results showed the proposed approach can effectively retrieve, classify, and manage construction information. Finally, the writers discuss the limitations of the proposed approach and future research directions.     

Domain Taxonomy for Construction Concepts: Toward a Formal Ontology for Construction Knowledge

With the advancement of the semantic web, the construction industry is at a stage where intelligent knowledge management systems can be used. Such systems support more effective collaboration, where virtual teams of skilled users, not software, exchange ideas, decisions, and best practice. To achieve that, there is a need to create consistent semantic representation of construction knowledge. Existing representations, in the form of classification systems and product data models, lack effective modeling of concept semantics—a fundamental requirement for human-based exchange of knowledge. Toward this objective, this paper presents a domain taxonomy that was developed as part of the e-COGNOS project. The taxonomy was developed as a first step in the establishment of domain ontology for construction. The taxonomy was developed to be process-centered and to allow for utilization of already existing classification systems (BS6100, Master Format, and UniClass, for example). The taxonomy uses seven major domains to classify construction concepts: Process, Product, Project, Actor, Resource, Technical Topics, and Systems. The taxonomy was developed and validated through extensive interaction with domain experts. The taxonomy was used to develop a prototype ontology for the construction domain including semantic relationships and axioms. The ontology was used to support several applications in semantic knowledge management as part of the e-COGNOS portal, including semantic indexing and retrieval of information and ontology-based collaborative project development.     

Ontology-Centered Knowledge Management Using Information Retrieval Techniques

The paper argues that an effective solution to information and knowledge management (KM) needs of practitioners in the construction industry can be found in the provision of an adapted knowledge environment that makes use of user profiling and document summarization techniques based on information retrieval sciences. The conceptualization of the domain through ontology takes a pivotal role in the proposed knowledge environment and provides a semantic referential to ensure relevance, accuracy, and completeness of information. A set of KM services articulated around the selected ontology have been developed, using the Web services model, tested, and validated in real organizational settings. This provided the basis for formulating recommendations and key success factors for any KM project development.     

Material-Based Construction Site Image Retrieval

The technological advancements in digital imaging, the widespread popularity of digital cameras, and the increasing demand by owners and contractors for detailed and complete site photograph logs have triggered an ever-increasing growth in the rate of construction image data collection, with thousands of images being stored for each project. However, the sheer volume of images and the difficulties in accurately and manually indexing them have generated a pressing need for methods that can index and retrieve images with minimal or no user intervention. This paper reports recent developments from research efforts in the indexing and retrieval of construction site images in architecture, engineering, construction, and facilities management image database systems. The limitations and benefits of the existing methodologies will be presented, as well as an explanation of the reasons for the development of a novel image retrieval approach that not only can recognize construction materials within the image content in order to index images, but also can be compatible with existing retrieval methods, enabling enhanced results.     

Case-Based Reasoning for Construction Hazard Identification: Case Representation and Retrieval

This paper proposes a case-based reasoning (CBR) approach to construction hazard identification that facilitates systematic feedback of past knowledge in the form of incident cases and hazard identification. This paper focuses on two of the key components of the CBR approach: (1) a detailed knowledge representation scheme, developed based on the modified loss causation model, to codify incident cases and past hazard identification and (2) an intelligent retrieval mechanism that can automatically retrieve relevant past cases. The detailed knowledge representation scheme presented herein is designed to model both incident cases and hazard identification so that both types of knowledge repository can be retrieved simultaneously and adapted for use. The scheme also includes a linguistic structure used to facilitate indexing of cases. The retrieval mechanism is based on the concept of similarity scoring. In this paper, a novel scoring technique based on semantic networks is presented. A case study is presented to demonstrate and validate the proposed approach.     

浅谈建设工程项目的合同管理

在工程项目管理过程中,合同管理可以说是整个项目管理的核心。文章针对建设工程合同的特征与作用,阐述了建设项目合同管理的主要内容,并对目前工程合同管理存在的主要问题,提出了几点加强工程合同管理的对策,旨在提高工程项目管理水平,从而促进企业的经济效益的增长。     

Master Builder Project Delivery System and Designer Construction Knowledge

The master builder system for designing and building construction projects was the dominant project delivery system in the construction industry during the early part of the 20th century. Master builders were generally charged with both design and construction services for a project. During the last half of the 20th century, many different systems for project delivery with fragmented responsibilities have replaced the master builder system. Reducing the use of the master builder system has led to the creation of elaborate systems for managing projects in the construction industry. In order to investigate the use of the master builder delivery system and other systems, a research project was conducted that included reviewing (1) the history of the construction industry, (2) project delivery systems, (3) constructability issues, (4) construction industry fragmentation, (5) the results of a survey of architecture, engineering, and construction professionals from the San Francisco Bay Area in California on the current processes they use for training engineers and architects, (6) an analysis of the survey results, (7) construction industry recommendations, and (8) conclusions based on the survey results and analysis. The information obtained from the research project, including the survey and an analysis of the results, is included in this document. The results of the research indicate that reduction in the use of the master builder project delivery system and the rise of numerous fragmented delivery systems have limited the designer’s knowledge of construction processes.     

Collaborative Negotiation Behaviors in Thai Construction Projects

When construction contractors encounter difficulties and changes from what was originally stated in contract documents, fair and equitable adjustments are required. Owners use construction management (CM) consultants to act as primary negotiators on their behalf. Throughout project execution, seamless negotiations take place that are intended to improve the relationships that are critical to successful project delivery. This study investigates the collaborative behaviors between CM consultants and contractors acting as negotiators in adverse situations. Characteristics of collaborative negotiations are identified as being rational, goal-oriented, reactive, cooperative, and adaptive. Four negotiable situations were investigated: change orders, errors in drawings and specifications, differing site conditions, and delayed progress payments. The research for this study used a questionnaire survey of 83 project managers from 51 CM consultants and 32 contractor companies focused on building construction in Thailand. The results show significant differences in collaborative behavior between CM consultants and contractors. Contractors were much more aware of the outcome of negotiations, which could lead them to be less collaborative. Both parties strongly regarded rationality as normal practice. Adaptability to new approaches proved difficult in negotiations. This study also proposes strategies and tactics for better collaboration to achieve win-win results in negotiations.     

Project Management Practices and Information Technology Research

Corporations of varying sizes and operations within the construction industry acclaim the contribution of project management applications that assist in business and operational practices. An integrated intelligent construction management application that enables process modeling and algorithmic analysis of construction process planning, interacts with a mainframe-based automated relational database system, and drives the project sequencing, scheduling, decision making and change management processes can introduce dramatic speed, simplicity, accuracy, and collaboration into existing project planning practices. Several research organizations and academic fraternities in concert with industry participation are focusing on the development of such futuristic tools as described above. However, evidence of such computing applications being used by the industry is minimal and a number of reasons have been cited by researchers for this. This study, through a review of the genesis, evolution, and future of computing applications in construction followed by an industry-wide survey, aims to study whether or not concurrent research agendas in construction information technology are truly sustainable from the industry’s perspective.     

浅谈建设工程施工合同管理

建筑施工合同是市场经济下,承发包双方都应遵守的行为准则,所以加强和提高施工合同管理是十分重要的.通过分析我国建筑施工合同管理中存在的问题及原因,提出了加强建筑施工合同管理的几点意见.     

Paving the Way to the Vision of Digital Construction: A Strategic Roadmap

The paper provides a synthesis of the construction industry needs and requirements in relation to the adoption and use of information and communication technologies (ICT). This is based, on the one hand, on existing research and technology development initiatives commissioned at a national and European level, and, on the other, on a wide consultation with construction industry key players across Europe. A framework, used as a basis for capturing industry requirements, and formulating an ICT vision, has been defined. Five priority areas have been identified with the potential to solve the ICT related problems of the construction industry, namely: knowledge management, legal and contractual aspects management, quality and performance management, total lifecycle management, and human aspects management. The ICT vision, enabled by addressing these priority areas, has been formulated on a consensus basis, and a detailed roadmap has been developed providing a pragmatic implementation of the proposed vision.     

Exploring Coordination Goals of Construction Projects

Effective coordination has been regarded in both theory and practice as a critical factor of success in construction projects. Previous coordination studies have focused on the time spent on coordination, its frequency, and its relationship with performance. However, coordination goals have received less attention, and their relationships with coordination methods and performance are not known. This paper studies coordination methods and goals for construction projects to identify what coordination goals are adopted and to what extent goals are achieved. In the research process, eight coordination methods and six goals were derived. A questionnaire was designed accordingly and sent to seven contractors for survey. Follow-up interviews were conducted with three or four managers and engineers from each contractor. The analysis results indicate that most coordination methods have multiple goals; written coordination methods such as plans, schedules, reports, and contract documents tend to have appropriate goals; and projects performed well by using coordination methods effectively to achieve the coordination goals.