A Case-Based Reasoning Approach for Construction Planning

This research effort aims to use a Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) approach for construction planning and attempts to investigate its advantages over traditional expert systems approach. Many expert systems for construction planning have been developed, but the existing planning systems are incapable of dealing with the situations when the required input information is incomplete or when the input information is slightly different from the applicable rules in their knowledge bases. A CBR approach is thus explored to overcome such problems. In this paper, a commercially available CBR software - ESTEEMTM is employed as the platform and a set of hypothetical planning cases are provided as the case base. The hypothetical cases are generated by a previously developed planning expert system that estimates duration and costs for building construction at the preliminary design stage. Test results have shown that CBR is a promising tool to compensate the drawbacks of traditional expert systems.