I-Corps: Scheduling software to enable visualization of changes for the construction industry

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is the development of a software tool that would help teams to effectively manage changes and their negative impacts on project schedules and resources. The current inefficient management and lack of tools to minimize negative impacts from changes hurts the cash flow of a project and its stakeholders.

Changes also delay projects significantly and lead to cost overruns. A recent study showed that the US construction industry spends $50 billion on change orders annually. Aside from the money spent on the direct cost of the change, such as materials and resources, much of these costs are wasted due to an inefficient use of time and lack of optimized planning procedures.

Reducing the impacts of changes on duration and cost is paramount and may help construction companies to develop sustainability strategies for their projects and the environment. Further, infrastructure projects funded by taxpayers’ money may leverage this tool as part of their value engineering mechanisms to gain more with the same level of resource allocation.

This I-Corps project is based on the development of an artificial intelligence (AI)-based visualization method that may assist project teams to effectively manage change events on any project. Current visualization tools do not have the capacity to analyze the impact of change orders on all three fronts: temporal, spatial, and resources. The proposed method leverages the integrated approach towards schedule, workspace, and resources using advanced natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to label and characterize change events data.

These advanced AI-driven computational techniques may help project teams to visualize, review, and plan for changes within a fraction of time as compared to traditional methods. More specifically, this method visualizes the individual and cumulative direct and indirect impacts of change events on associated schedule activities using spaghetti graphs in which spaghetti lines and the change events are color coded by the usage of underlying resources.

It also visualizes the utilization of space and resources, the underlying conflicts and over utilization due to the impacts of change events. The goal is to create an array of planning options to allow project teams to choose a sequence that minimizes both cost and duration impact.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.