Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

Construction operations are highly dynamic. Making decisions to manage and control these operations require decision support tools that can efficiently track the deviations from original plans and facilitate the evaluation of alternative scenarios and courses of actions. Traditional tools are mostly centered around data oriented information systems with limited modeling capabilities. This research aims at developing a model-based decision support framework. The core component of such framework is a comprehensive simulation model that captures the dynamics of a construction operation and is capable of simulating the behaviors of the operation under different conditions. The model can then be used as a virtual counterpart to the real life operation to test and evaluate the effects of different decisions on the performance of the operation. To achieve the goals of this research, advanced distributed simulation and data mining techniques are used to model the different aspects of the operations and semantic data models are used to link and integrate the simulations. The research is applied to four different construction domains that include industrial construction scaffolding, earth moving projects, mining operations, and construction equipment management.