1

INTRODUCTION

Concurrent engineering technology has been developed substantially in automotive and other manufacturing
applications. It is now finding applications in the construction industry in both the U.S. (El-Bibany and
Paulson, 1999; Pena-Mora and Hussein, 1999) and Japan (Kaneta et al., 1999). The current prevailing
practice is to complete the design before the construction is started. But, changes in the design might be
necessary to improve the product or project even after the construction has already begun. Successful
application of concurrent engineering in the construction industry should be based on effective integration of
the construction management and scheduling with the design process (Adeli, 1999, 2000). Two essential
prerequisites for such an integration are a tool to automate the complex process of engineering design and a
tool for construction scheduling, cost optimization and change order management.
Automation of design of large one-of-a-kind civil engineering systems is a challenging problem due
partly to the open-ended nature of the problem and partly to the highly nonlinear constraints that can baffle
optimization algorithms (Adeli, 1994). Optimization of large and complex engineering systems is
particularly challenging in terms of convergence, stability, and efficiency. Recently, Adeli and Park (1995a,
1998) developed a robust neural dynamics optimization model for automating the complex process of
engineering design and applied it to very large-scale problems including the minimum weight design of a
144-story superhighrise building structure with more than 20,000 members.
The construction project schedule is an important document in the construction industry. The construction
project participants, such as the contractor and the owner, use the construction schedule to plan, monitor,
and control project work. The goal is the completion of the project within budget and time, and to the
satisfaction of all project participants. In recent years the construction schedule has increasingly been used
as a legal document in resolving disputes and verifying claims among the project participants. Further,
change order claims are communicated, verified, and studied through construction schedules. Therefore, the
value of the construction schedule cannot be overstated. For its effectiveness, every construction schedule
must have two essential characteristics. First, it must be based on an accurate model of the construction
project. Second, it must provide features necessary for project control and management. A software system
for generating and maintaining such schedules is therefore highly desirable.
A construction schedule is traditionally defined as the timetable of the execution of tasks in a project.
Resources are assigned to the tasks before the project is scheduled. Thus, resources are handled separately
and independently of the time. This results in a cost model that is disconnected from the time model thus
making cost and time control difficult and imprecise. Further, the scheduled times of the tasks in the project
are not updateable in a structured manner to reflect changes that have occurred since the project started.
This makes project monitoring, control, and change order management cumbersome and difficult.
In recent years, the use of construction scheduling software has made the use of schedules in the
construction industry widespread. However, the underlying modeling technology used and the process of