Information modelling for case-based construction planning of highway bridge projects

In practice, construction planning and control draws on large-scale project and corporate data repositories, which are often unstructured. This articl e argues that the development of a large-scale data repository should be th e precursor to any case-based reasoning system development. The article pre sents a large number of conceptual object models, which were developed to i dentify the attributes and relationships between product and planning infor mation comprehensively, using bridges as a representative product. The mode ls were used to develop a large information repository implemented in a dat abase management system to facilitate real world project information collat ion, organisation, and management to reflect the large-scale nature of cons truction projects in practice. The database acts as a source of cases and s ub-cases that are retrieved and mapped into a case-base. These cases are co nsidered individually for indexing, matching, retrieval, and validation pur poses, facilitating the re-use of parts of multiple cases to construct new project plans. A prototype software model, CBRidge Planner, which was devel oped and tested with real world project cases to demonstrate the approach i s presented. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.