SQIT 3033 KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION IN DECISION MAKING GROUP A

TITLE : DISCUSS HOW DATA MINING APPLICATION CAN BE UTILIZED IN CONSTRUCTION PROJECT.

NAME : NUR ADILA BINTI HUSNY. (212372)

DUE DATE:6 MARCH 2014

Data mining application is the process of discovering meaningful new correlation, patterns and trends by sifting through large amounts of data stored in repositories. It will be one of the most revolutionary developments of the next decade. Data mining techniques is use to get knowledge from construction management data repositories. Data mining is a multidisciplinary area in which several computing paradigms converge: decision trees, rule induction, artificial neural networks, instance base learning, Bayesian learning, logic programming, statistical programming. There were a lot of construction projects in progress. The project has got a lot of information that has recorded and entered in computer. Based on the example on one of the construction project they have use data mining techniques like Classification and Association Rules to develop their results. They have used CRISP-DM as their standard procedure that future data mining projects in this area would use this papers information. It controls project completion within the time defined. By controlling activities status and comparing it with the project main baseline, and calculating activity delays and floats are some of primary tasks in this section of project management. Data mining techniques can assess and analyze the data gathered to find information that can use in the future project. Also data mining can offer some techniques for predicting the future status of projects, for example giving some old projects data to it, it can predicts the situation which they are interested to them. Delay is one of main variables to discuss. It is one of the main indicators of the project time management and somehow it shows the quality of time management in projects. Project management team, at the beginning of a project will record starting activities duration estimation, which they may use some experts in this field to estimate activities duration based on the allocated resources to that specific activity. Also they will calculate other resources like cost and labor. They change the time of activities start and end in a way that the levels of resources become almost as constant as possible. In the real project after the starts of the project, due to some factors (external and internal) some project activities might have some delay in completion, so the activity network may cause other successor activities to start with some delay.

Due to huge amount of the number of activities and their precedence relations in activity network in different projects, they should use computer to analyze and mine related data. They process the data gathered by project management software and put them in data mining algorithms to see the patterns and relations. Most of the project management software packages store their data in the format which just could readable only by their software. This means that the only way to access their data is to use that specific software. On the other hand most of the data mining software solutions are able to connect to the specific data files, for example Microsoft Project can connect to MS SQL Server to store its data or Primavera Enterprise should connect to MS SQL Server. In conclusion, data mining application can be utilized in construction project by analyze the data gathered to extract knowledge or patterns so that the project manager may have a better understanding of causal relationship in a project. By applying data mining, it can find useful relationships between risk factors, remedial measures and results in this article, to assessment the risk combination, and to help the decision makers to find effective measures to avoid the loss of construction risk.

References : 1. Dominic D.Ahiaga-Dagbui and Simon D.Smith. MY COST RUNNETH OVER: DATA MINING TO REDUCE CONSTRUCTION COST OVERRUNS. From website : http://www.academia.edu/5088041/_My_cost_runneth_over_Data_mining_to_reduce_co nstruction_cost_overruns 2. Shahram Shadrokh and Seyedbehzad Aghdashi. DATA MINING IN CONSTRUCTIONS PROJECT TIME MANAGEMENT - KAYSON CASE STUDY From website : http://sid.ir/en/vewssid/s_pdf/125E20090507.pdf