Project Management Informatics

Faculty are working with students on a research project developing a project management software program.This research project uses case-based reasoning (CBR), an artificial intelligence (AI) approach that overcomes most of the drawbacks of rule-based expert systems (e.g., codification of the knowledge base) by looking for previous cases that are similar to the current problem and reusing them to solve the problem.CBR has been successfully used in solving design, diagnoses, and prediction problems.The objective of this research is to develop a generic project management informatics system (PMIS) based on the CBR approach to assist project managers in evaluating project performance, predicting overruns, and recommending corrective actions.The PMIS will complement the functionality of existing project management tools and act as a decision-support tool, which benefits from the knowledge encapsulated in previous construction projects.Current project management tools, such as P3, Project Work Bench, and MS Project, are designed to perform well-structured tasks such as schedule calculations, resource allocation, and earned value computations.However, these tools cannot perform tasks that require personal judgment and experience, such as early diagnoses of time and cost overruns, reliable prediction of future deviations, and dependable suggestion of corrective actions.Knowledge-based systems have been developed to support these tasks using rulebased expert systems.However, these systems have serious limitations in their functionality, expandability, and knowledge acquisition.A "proof of concept" prototype of the PMIS will be developed for the construction domain because of the long history of construction project management and the availability of successful and unsuccessful case examples of construction projects.