Automated corrective action selection assistant

Automated daily site reporting coupled with computerized data interpretation as an integral part of a project management system has the potential to be the missing link for effective construction project monitoring and control. This paper describes a schema to perform the automated interpretation of daily site records, to identify activities experiencing difficulties, to identify the source(s) of these difficulties, to identify the types of problems resulting, to find corroborating information from the daily site records, to validate the causes of these problems, and to suggest likely corrective actions. A framework is presented wherein each component of the analysis schema is defined. This framework includes a set of user-assigned activity-interpretation attributes, a set of problem sources, and a set of corrective actions. Expert rules are used to link these components, and fuzzy logic is used to define the imprecise relationships that exist between them. A prototype system has been developed to implement and test the schema (to be presented in a companion paper).