An Object-Oriented Approach for Scheduling of Construction Projects

Robotic construction equipment will need to plan and replan in response to rapidly changing site and external market conditions of a project. A group of researchers at Standford University is conducting research on the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to develop enhanced tools for generating plans and schedules automatically from CAD descriptions of facilities. Currently available network-based project scheduling tools provide capabilities for heuristic resource leveling and resource-constrained scheduling; however they are only of limited value in making time-cost tradeoff decisions when project completion times must be shortened. To address this limitation, the authors are developing JANUS, a knowledge-based system for simulating and analyzing time-cost tradeoff issues on facility projects in more detail. This paper lays out the rationale underlying the design of JANUS, and describes the architecture of a prototype system developed using IntelliCorp’s KEE knowledge processing environment.