Developing a draft schedule using templates and rules

The effort required for the initial drafting of a plan is often a real barrier to developing a useful and high quality schedule for a construction project. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate how an expert system with an editable rule base can be combined with standard templates of modifiable, predefined knowledge within a project management system in order to generate draft schedules based on limited user input. The user can capitalize on past experience by creating a template for each recurring project type. The knowledge contained in the templates is broken down into a physical view (i.e., what is being built), a process view (i.e., how it will be built), and rules for scaling the templates and computing durations based on user input. The physical view is a hierarchical breakdown structure of components that describes (without quantifying) the physical and spatial characteristics of the project type. The process view contains a list of typical activities and the logic relationships that describe their sequencing. The rules serve to link and then expand the two views in order to generate a draft schedule for the project-at-hand once its scale is specified. The feasibility and capabilities of the proposed approach are demonstrated in the context of a full-sized project composed of three buildings.