A project-oriented data warehouse for construction

A construction organization generates a great amount of operational data that are distributed across various functional systems to support its daily operations. Although those data may be potentially useful for future projects, they are not widely collected and centrally stored in the organization. This research presents a Project-oriented Data Warehouse (PDW) for contractors. PDW is designed with dimensional data models consisting of 26 tables. Sixteen of the tables are dimension tables for storing general descriptive information, and the other ten are fact tables for detailing various facts that are captured in the lifecycle of construction projects. PDW can be directly populated with data from existing operational systems, such as P3 files, MS Access, P3/e databases, and Excel files. It maintains each data in the context of its associated project so that a user can retrieve a specific piece of information plus any background information of the related project. PDW has been populated with three sample project data. Through the user interface, a user can generate interested query reports as needed. The presented warehouse structure and data models are scalable. They may be adopted by medium or large contractors for developing company-level data facilities. (C) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.