Developing an electronic acquisition model for project scheduling using XML-based information standard

In recent years, effective communication among project participants has been regarded as one of the critical factors for achieving project success. Participants in a multi-contract project acquire external real-time scheduling information from other involved parties and use this to make appropriate decisions in regard to project control. However, there are two major obstacles to project participants gaining efficient access to external information in a distributed data environment: (1) the variety of data structures that project members may use, and (2) the lack of an automatic mechanism for data acquisition. Based on the ontology defined by the eXtensible markup language Schema for Scheduling (XSS), the Data Acquisition Language for Scheduling (DALS), the Hierarchy Searching Algorithm (HSA), and an automatic mechanism called Message Transfer Chain (MTC), an Electronic Acquisition Model for Project Scheduling (e-AMPS) centralized in an information agent, Message Agent (MA), was developed. Each participant equips a Message Agent as his unique information window to automatically acquire external information and provide other participants with scheduling information as well. The ultimate goal of this study is to build an automatic communication environment for multi-contract projects to solve the above mentioned difficulties, and thus achieve effective communication among project participants. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.