TR102: Case-Based Reasoning and Hypermedia: Enabling Technologies for Construction Experience Transfer

Construction projects are vast repositories of knowledge and skills of various kinds. The highly dynamic nature of construction makes the knowledge and skills available on construction projects extremely transitory. The turnover and migration of workers, changes in phase and the lack of convenient access to stored experience-related information are major stumbling blocks in the transfer and effective utilization of construction experience.

This research focused on the issue of using prior experience from past projects as primary inputs to the process of carrying out problem-solving tasks in the design and execution phases of current and future projects. It identifies the major obstacles to experience transfer, develops a rationale for choosing knowledge-based decision-aiding systems rather than fully automated knowledge-based systems for use as mediums of experience transfer and develops a software architecture for the development of such knowledge-based systems.

The research also identified the domain of concrete mix design for the development and testing of an experience transfer system and established the point of departure for future research work in this area. The main focus of the prototype development effort will be to build and test a computer-based system which would design concrete mixes through the retrieval and adaptation of prior mix designs. This part of the research will be carried out as part of the author's doctoral dissertation work.