Integrated EDM and 4D BIM-Based Decision Support System for Construction Projects Control

Abstract

Project schedule monitoring and controlling are critical challenges of construction project management that are not adequately implemented, likely due to the predominance of earned value management and the lack of utilizing technology, such as BIM tools. Unlike earned value, earned duration management (EDM) was developed, which includes several indices to track schedule progress and measure the performance of a schedule. The goal of this research was to establish a decision support system to track and monitor construction project activities during construction, with better performance and accuracy. A survey was conducted and distributed among ten site engineers, selected from different construction sites. The survey asked the site engineers about the possible durations of certain activities; based on their answers, the authors started the proposed system. In this study, we aimed to develop a decision support system (DSS), which combines BIM with EDM to help calculate probabilistic total project duration, visually detecting critical activities, monitoring visually risky activities subjected to delay and visually categorizing the accuracy of estimated duration for delayed activities.