Data mining construction project information to aid project management

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Internationally, the popularity of data mining and its use in a business context has grownrapidly in many sectors. The organisations that utilise data mining have experiencedsignificant gains in efficiency, productivity and profitability. The utilisation of data miningwithin the construction industry has however lagged behind other sectors, especially in SouthAfrica.Data mining to aid project management has seen limited application. The leader in applyingdata mining to improve project management has been the software development sector as it isplagued by project cost and time overruns and a high number of failed projects. Theconstruction industry in South Africa suffers from similar cost and time overruns, yet datamining in the construction sector has been limited. Few applications exist of data mining toimprove the management of construction projects.The process followed to implement a data mining application has been largely focused on thespecific statistical and technical details of the data preparation and the data mining model.These details are inherently application specific and do not provide a general data miningprocess. Guides that define and demonstrate the general data mining process are limited oroutdated, with no such guide existing for data mining in the construction sector.The research examines the application of data mining to the construction sector and to theimprovement of project management in the software development sector. From these sourcesand a discussion of construction projects in South Africa, a comprehensive data miningprocess is synthesised. The data mining process is discussed in the context of the constructionsector in South Africa and construction sector personnel with limited experience of datamining. A number of user-friendly, yet rigorous, data mining resources are presented. Aselection of these resources are applied to a real project dataset obtained from the WesternCape Government's Department of Public Works' internal project database. A data miningapplication is developed by adhering to the data mining process defined within the research.The results were discussed along with several salient lessons learned.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University