Design of construction industry information management systems

Effective management of construction projects depends on good access to and control of data, especially data pertaining to cost and schedule control functions. Long recognizing the need to integrate these interrelated functions, researchers have proposed conceptual models to achieve this purpose. However, the proper design of an automated solution that would support the needs of integrated cost and schedule control and provide distributed access to data for different processing needs has been lacking. The purpose of this paper is to show how such an automated solution (represented by a data storage model) was properly designed and developed. The data storage model is developed using the first three steps of the process used to model engineering problems. The first step, problem definition, was accomplished using the work packaging model to solve the integration problem and by using data collection forms developed by R. S. Means Company to identify what data items are collected in cost and schedule control. The second step, conceptual modeling, utilizes Nijssen’s information analysis methodology (NIAM) for data modeling. For the third step, computational modeling, the relational data model is selected. Each of the foregoing steps is described in detail in this paper.