A Group Support System for improving value management studies in construction

Group Support System (GSS) is a set of techniques, software and technology designed to focus and enhance the communication, deliberations and decision-making of groups. The thousands of GSS experimental studies and field studies that have been conducted in the past 2 decades demonstrate that GSS is successful in improving the efficiency, reliability and quality of the group decision-making process in meetings. This paper aims to introduce the application of GSS to support Value Management (VM) studies so as to improve the implementation of VM in the construction industry. It begins with an introduction to VM and the problems of implementing VM in construction, e.g. lack of information, lack of participation and interaction and difficulties in conducting evaluation and analysis. This is followed by a description of a GSS framework for VM studies and a specific GSS prototype system to illustrate how this framework can provide support in discussion, information, collaboration and decision analysis to overcome the existing problems in VM studies. The trial run of the prototype by professionals and the benefits of using the proposed system in VM studies have also been discussed in detail.