Web-Based Decision Support Systems: Case Study inProject Delivery

Abstract

The decentralized nature of the construction industry contributes to difficulties in the implementation and dissemination of project management-based decision tools. The majority of decision support systems (DSS) are contained in-house with private developers and users, or on researchers stand-alone computers and academic journals. Current World Wide Web technologies provide the appropriate means for large-scale implementation and continued development of DSS for the architectural, engineering, and construction community. This paper documents a DSS developed specifically for design/build project selection among United States public sector agencies. The system, the Design/Build Selector (DBS), is Web enabled, allowing for easy access and large-scale dissemination. Design/build project procurement is rapidly expanding throughout public sector agencies in the United States construction industry. As public agencies turn to design/build, appropriate project selection is a primary consideration affecting successful delivery. Prior to the implementation of DBS, there was no systematic or formalized method for selecting projects appropriate for design/build. Since 1997, the Web site that houses the DBS has been visited by over 4,000 people, and the DBS tool has been used on 102 projects representing over $4.8 billion in construction. This paper reports on the application and potential for Web-based DSS in civil engineering. The architecture of the program, data collection, model weighting, and output interface are explained.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 46 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.