Mukherjee, A (2005) A multi-agent framework for general purpose situational simulations in construction management. PhD thesis, University of Washington, USA.
Abstract
There is a concern that the fragmented and decontextualized nature of the construction management (CM) curricula (McCabe et. al. 2000, Sawhney et. al. 2001) does not adequately prepare students far the industry. In order to do so we feel it is imperative to examine the nature of learning in the CM domain. How do novice construction managers learn? How do they build intuition through experience? Most importantly, what tools do we have that will allow us to train novice construction managers and provide educators with answers to the above questions. This research effort proposes that agent-driven situational simulations provide us with such tools, because they provide an interactive, dynamic, contextually rich, self organizing environment in which participants can explore “what-if” scenarios and test the validity of their decisions. The focus of this dissertation was to develop and test a general-purpose multi-agent framework that can be used by a community of developers to create situational simulations for the construction management domain. Conceptually the framework is based on the understanding that problems in the construction management domain can be expressed as constraint satisfaction problems (CSP) and the constraints can be categorized as either temporal or resource constraints. The formal foundations of the multi-agent framework are set in the semantics of interval temporal logic (Allen, J. F. & Ferguson, G. , 1994) that allows us to represent construction activities and events as intervals that are bounded by time points. The framework provides a grammar for autonomous agents to use for their interaction. The autonomous agents can communicate and reason about the evolution of the simulation, while being sympathetic to user interaction. The grammar also forms the basis of an API that can be used by developers to create their own special purpose situational simulations. The Virtual Coach, an interactive situational simulation was implemented and tested using the proposed multi-agent framework in Sun Java 1. 4. 2 SDK.
| Item Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Thesis advisor: | Rojas, E M |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | construction activities; foundations; learning; developer; simulation |
| Index terms: | interaction, agent, validity, satisfaction, evolution, sun, self-organizing, semantics, construction manager, intuition, resource constraint, foundations, construction activity, dissertation |
| Subjects: | operations management, environmental science, behavioral psychology, energy systems, evaluation and assessment methods, analytical methods, project delivery, cognitive psychology, structural engineering, research dissemination and communication, profession, practitioner, construction operations, sociology |
| Topics: | Organizational Design, Engineering Principles, Roles and Professions, Site Management, Project Management, Sustainability, Research Practice |
| Descriptive scope: | 3 PCA |
N.B. Descriptive scope is a count of how many of the five facets of empirical research are indicated by the words used in title, abstract and keywords. It is not intended as a judgement on the research; merely a count of the kind of word we would expect to indicate Phenomenon, Concepts, Theoretical framing, Empirical techniques, Analytical techniques. If all five are present, then a code of “5 PCTEA” will indicate this. If you feel the coding for this record is questionable, we welcome discussion around the terms we matched or the way we categorized them. The facet you would expect may not be coded, or a facet may be coded inappropriately. This can also bear on a larger question, of which facets should be treated as defining in construction management research. Please get in touch, and we will look at it. More details here