Capturing and representing construction project histories for estimating and defect detection

Abstract

History of a construction project can have a multitude of uses in supporting decisions throughout the lifecycle of a facility and on new projects. Based on motivating case studies, this paper describes the need for and some issues associated with capturing and representing construction project histories. This research focuses on supporting defect detection and decision-making for estimating an upcoming activity's production rates, and it proposes an integrated approach to develop and represent construction project histories. The proposed approach starts with identifying the data needs of different stake-holders from job sites and leverages available automated data collection technologies with their specific performance characterizations to collect the data required. Once the data is captured from a variety of sensors, then the approach incorporates a data fusion formalism to create an integrated project history model that can be analyzed in a more comprehensive way. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.