Construction information database framework (CIDF) for integrated cost, schedule, and performance control

In the information age today, information is getting more and more important. A project success is directly related to continuous access to accurate project information. A construction project involves an enormous amount of information becoming more complex, specific, and professional. Though a lot of effort including information models, information tools, and standards has been applied to overcome these challenges, poor communication and information chaos still remain as an unsolved assignment in the construction industry. In the project execution phase, project participants understand who is going to do what and how, where, why, and when they are going to do it. It is virtually impossible to identify all potential situations by using a current information system. Five fundamental problems are identified within the research scope; limited focus to a specific problem and its partial solutions, lack of an integrated information framework, a fixed and single-directional representation method, sophisticated applications, and lack of an appropriate evaluation method. Then, an inevitable question remains: "how does an information system provide the right data to the right person at the right time to the right place?" The primary purpose of this research is to provide a guideline on how to gather, record, track, share, and retrieve project execution data with an accurate, efficient, and consistent manner. The research proposes a Construction Information Database Framework (CIDF) that supports various management functions having multi-perspectives and multi-levels of detail with a single database structure. For an effective response to the topic, the research adopts four different parts of methodology; a faceted structure composed of independent 5W1H (: WHAT, WHERE, WHEN, WHO, WHY, and HOW) information units (the structural part); semantic-rich, multi-functional, and multi-perspectives database (the semantic part); a familiar, easily accessible, and flexible information system (the application part); and an appropriate methods to measure the model's practicability (the evaluation part). These parts of methodology are integrated into one predefined structure, CIDF. In the domain of construction execution database, the CIDF allows information users to access multi-directional, -dimensional, and -levels of detail information with relatively small amount of overhead effort compared with current information tools.