An intelligent decision support system in construction management by data warehousing technique

Abstract

The integration of a Data Warehouse and a Decision Support System (DSS) can provide construction managers with sufficient information for decision making without interrupting daily work of an On-Line Transaction Processing system. In this paper, the concepts of the data warehouse, On-Line Analysis Processing and DSS are first reviewed. The method of creating a data warehouse is then shown, changing the data in the data warehouse into a multidimensional data cube and integrating the data warehouse with a DSS. An application example is given to illustrate the use of the Construction Management Decision Support System developed in this study. This prototype system can enable the right data to be tracked down and provides the required information in a direct, rapid and meaningful way. Construction managers can view data from various perspectives with significantly reduced query time, thus making decisions more efficiently. Moreover, the approach can be applied to other fields.