Integration of data warehouse into knowledge-based system on construction management decision making

During the construction management process, an important issue is ta furnish construction managers with information about and insight inta the existing data with a view to facilitating more efficient decision making without interrupting the daily work of an on-line transaction processing system. With the recent advances in artificial Intelligence technology, the integration of data warehause into knowledge-based system (KBS) is a feasible solution. Data warehouse technology, which has not been applied to construction management, is a new database branch. It is meaningful ta experiment and gauge the full scope of its capability in this specific problem domain. This paper describes a prototype integrated KBS, which has been developed using a commercially available microcomputer-based expert system shell VISUAL RULE STUDIO, on construction management decision making. VISUAL RULE STUDIO acts as an ActlveX Designer under the Micrasoft Visual Basic programming environment, with hybrid knowledge representatian approach under object-oriented design environment. The coupling enables the right data to be tracked down and furnishes the necessary information in a direct, rapid and meaningful way. Through custom-built interactive graphical user interfaces, construction managers can view data from various perspectives with significantly reduced respanse time to queries, thus rendering more efficient decision making. Illustrative sample sessions using the system are also presented.