CHARACTERISTICS OF DESIGN-RELEVANT CONSTRUCTABILITY KNOWLEDGE

Constructability should be an important objective in all phases of a c onstruction project, and designers play an important role in achieving superior constructability. Most projects, however, do not receive con structability input though prior research has demonstrated the benefit s of such input. One reason for this lack of constructability input, w e argue, is the lack of formal, explicit constructability knowledge ba ses that link constructability issues to design decisions and that can be made available on-line to interested parties. This paper describes research that compiled and formalized constructability knowledge rela ted to reinforced concrete structures. To ensure appropriate and speci fic constructability input, we classified the knowledge by constructio n methods and structural elements. To make this specific knowledge ava ilable to designers at the right time during design development, we fu rther divided it into the five groups: application heuristics, layout knowledge, dimensioning knowledge, detailing knowledge, and exogenous knowledge. This classification leads to conclusions regarding the abil ity to collect and formalize this knowledge, and to make it readily av ailable to designers to improve project performance.