Modeling a decision support system for buildable designs

Buildable design is an important concept adopted to raise productivity and quality standards in the construction industry. The purpose of this study is to develop an integrated design approach to decision-making in buildable designs based on the principles and methods of concurrent engineering. To develop such an approach, the House of Quality for Buildable Designs (HOQBD) was constructed to support the integrated decision-making of buildable designs by adapting matrices of the conventional HOQ of quality function deployment (QFD). The algorithms and inference mechanisms of the HOQBD were then developed by fuzzy set theories. A hybrid QFD system was further proposed by incorporating the knowledge-based system into the fuzzy HOQBD. A prototype software, named a Decision Support System for Buildable Designs (the BD-DSS), was developed to demonstrate and test the proposed concurrent design approach in Singapore. The BD-DSS has demonstrated its ability in quantitative buildability evaluation through a cooperative multi-functional project team.