Hybrid Tools for Infrastructure Construction Business Intelligence (original) (raw)

Management is essential to meet the requirements defined in a project, such as business objectives and stakeholder expectations. The computational tools in the Business Intelligence and Analytics category have great potential to contribute to management, providing important managerial information about the business. Tools of this type are widely used in the most varied sectors of the industry, but in the construction industry, the scenario is different, with much to move foward. Therefore, the present work presents a survey of the Business Intelligence and Analytics tools applicable to the civil construction sector and its uses. To this end, a systematic literature review was conducted, which analyzed 1407 articles from six databases, where several applications were identified, the most relevant in the area of cost management, budget preparation and work safety.

The construction business currently contributes 13% of the world's Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and it is anticipated that by the year 2030, its value would have increased by 85%, reaching $15.5 billion globally. China, the United States of America, and India are the three countries that are most responsible for the demand in the building business. Keeping subcontractors, contractors, designers, clients, and other parties routinely supplied with vast amounts of information has been one of the most challenging difficulties in the construction industry. The application of Information Technology (IT) has significantly contributed to the integration of disparate pieces of information within the context of widely dispersed construction projects. The construction sector, including the full construction value chain, is presently going through a period of transformation. The amount of money that is being invested into Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rising at a rate that is almost impo...

This paper presents a framework of an ad-hoc data analytic and Business Intelligence service tailored to a construction project. Mandates of delivering integrated information solutions and effective reporting are commonly required nowadays in large capital projects. Due to the nature of construction projects with schedule and budget constraints, poorly defined business problems prohibited the team to deploy full scale data analytic and Business Intelligence (BI) services on site. On the other hand, the increasingly complex data coming from multiple applications and organizations on projects requires more powerful data integration tools and techniques. The proposed framework outlines an agile and ad hoc best practice for job site data analytics and effective reporting based on a real use case from a large pharmaceutical project. Processes in the framework include data alignment, Level of Detail (LoD) data articulation and analytical model establishment. It also illustrates how to resolve complex data analytic challenges for unforeseen cost disputes and how to deliver solutions within a short period of time.

In construction projects, managers make multiple decisions every day. Most of these decisions are relatively unimportant; some of them are critical and could lead to the success or failure of a construction project. To ensure construction companies make effective managerial decisions, decision making requires performing an initial technical and economic analysis, comparing different decision-making solutions, using a planning system, and ensuring project implementation based on the provided plans. Therefore, the use of powerful systems such as business intelligence (BI), which play a central role in management and decision-making, is essential in project-based companies. The current study aims to determine and evaluate the main managerial opportunities in the application of BI in project-based construction companies using a descriptive survey approach. An empirical research questionnaire consisting of 60 factors and 7 categories was adopted. The questionnaire, after confirming its v...

A nations’ construction sector is an important sector of its economy. The same goes for the Nigerian Construction sector. Huge volumes of investment and capital expenditure from the central economy go into this sector of the economy in a bid to provide infrastructure for sustainable development. The construction industry is a driver for the economic growth of any nation. However, the Nigerian construction industry has consistently underperformed when compared with its potential for output. In an effort to identify the key causes for this massive underperformance and the Non value adding activities crippling the Nigerian Construction Sector (NCS), a comprehensive research was conducted. This research revealed that communication between stakeholders, ease of collaboration between project professionals on and off site, Inadequate scheduling of tasks as well as task monitoring systems and improper management of physical resources on site amongst other things are the major inhibitors to ...

The construction sector relies heavily on data, and the successful completion of its projects depends on adequate access to and automated management of the data. Therefore, it is crucial to manage information resources effectively in the building's field since it affects people's productivity, the completion of projects on time, and the cost-effective completion of projects. Although each step of the lifecycle has its data and is maintained separately, most data are typically shared throughout the project's phases to aid decision-making. In the past few years, information technology played a significant role in contemporary culture. As a result, many initiatives have been embarked on to pay extreme attention to creating efficient tools to handle a broad spectrum of responsibilities throughout the construction phase. Regardless, there are still multiple challenges to overcome before information technology concepts can be efficient within the project management framework f...

Most of projects are managed using commercial software. Despite their usefulness, software’s based on traditional planning modeling present many weaknesses. We can note that their graphical planning concept is still global and require a detailed scheduling in order to calculate the critical path. Also, they lacked to answer to all planners’ needs, to solve all kind of problems or to represent all types of projects. This paper proposes a new generation of construction management software. This system is arranged in independent modules that can be connected to the project database. Modules are systems intended to execute the different functions, such as estimation or planning. The paper discusses in detail the graphical planning module. This module is design based on the Chronographical Theory, which can present the information under different and compatible facets in order to help manager to solve various problems, to represent different types of projects and to allow the decision-ma...