Construction Method Models Using Context Aware Construction Requirements for Automated Schedule Generation

Scheduling is a mostly manual process, which is typically time consuming. To overcome this problem, researchers have developed various knowledge based, model based and case based representation approaches to automatically generate construction schedules. Despite the attention accorded by academics, the Architectural, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry has been reluctant to adopt automatic schedule generation. Several reasons exist for this, of which one lies in being able to robustly generate feasible schedules under different project contexts. These contexts include differing project layouts, and schedule milestones. This failure has eroded the confidence of industry practitioners in employing automatic schedule generation tools; practitioners prefer to rely on manual methods rather than trust automated methods in which they perceive as having little control over. This paper proposes a rule based approach which explicitly accounts for project context through a query mechanism. These rules are defined from construction requirements which represent pre-requisite conditions for construction processes to occur. This approach makes several research contributions: Firstly, a construction method model based on construction requirements is introduced to link product and process models. Secondly, a query language is utilized to enable project information to be embedded in the construction requirement specification. The approach is validated on a subway construction project against an actual expert.