Graph-based deep learning model for knowledge base completion in constraint management of construction projects

Construction projects face various constraints in terms of materials, labor, equipment, and documents, which can interrupt the scheduled work. Package-based constraint management (PCM) is a state-of-the-art graph-based approach that follows the lean theory to effectively model, monitor, and remove constraints before the commencement of work, ensuring smooth construction and minimizing delay and waste. PCM relies on exploring and investigating project knowledge bases (KBs), formed by entity-relation-entity triples of constraints. However, most PCM KBs are incomplete and suffer from poor semantics, which hinders the PCM functions. Although many KB completion (KBC) methods exist in the field of artificial intelligence, they primarily focus on general knowledge and exclude the features of specific domains. Therefore, they cannot be directly applied to complete PCM KBs. To address the issue, this study proposes a novel deep learning model, referred to as the domain information enhanced graph neural network (D-GNN). The features of the developed D-GNN include (1) building a domain ontology to enrich semantics with rule reasoning, (2) applying the GNN to learn and encode embeddings of constraint entities and relations, and (3) employing a convolution neural network (CNN) for decoding and identifying missing triples. D-GNN improves the existing KBC methods by integrating two types of domain information, namely, the ontological classes and working contexts into GNN and CNN, respectively. The experimental results verified that the D-GNN reached an accuracy of 0.848–0.951, and the domain information integration increased the performance by up to 0.263. In practical testing, the D-GNN significantly reduced the KBC time to 1/6–1/35 of the manual approach and reached higher accuracy. Therefore, the proposed D-GNN can facilitate PCM by providing complete KBs and supporting downstream constraint monitoring and removal.