Browsing by Author "Dzeng, RJ"

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Automatic schedule integration for highway projects
(2003-07-01)
Dzeng, RJ
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Wang, WC
;
土木工程學系
;
Department of Civil Engineering
The construction of a highway/expressway, which involves a complex combination of roads, bridges, and tunnels, is generally separated into several projects. Various contractors thus execute different projects and often apply differing scheduling practices. Since all projects involved in highway construction must be completed for the highway to be useful, the management of the various projects should preferably be integrated. To assist project controllers in schedule integration, this study proposes algorithms based on standardized codes and network modules. A computer system was also designed to help contractors use these modules for scheduling, and ultimately to let project controllers combine these schedules electronically. A questionnaire survey and industry feedback revealed the potential benefits of using the proposed algorithms for generating and integrating schedules, respectively. Contractors' computation capabilities must be improved before the proposed scheduling algorithms can be fully implemented. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
Automating schedule review for expressway construction
(2005-01-01)
Dzeng, RJ
;
Tserng, HP
;
Wang, WC
;
土木工程學系
;
Department of Civil Engineering
An expressway project is often divided into subprojects with different tendering packages, and carried out by several general contractors that apply different scheduling practices. Each schedule may contain hundreds of activities, each of which is associated with multiple pay items that determine its earned monetary value. With such huge amount of information, the reviewer can only check a sample piece of information, and the quality of review highly depends on the reviewer's experience and devotion. Automated schedule review provides a solution to reduce such problems encountered in the industry. This paper presents a module-based schedule generation and review model, which includes a predefined set of network modules, network builder assistant computer system that helps schedulers manage and reuse the modules to build a new schedule, and another computer system network review assistant (NRA) that helps reviewers review schedules. The NRA uses generalized rule forms to represent the schedule critique knowledge collected from the industry. When potential errors are found, the NRA adopts case-based reasoning to suggest possible correction based on similar cases. The evaluation conducted by the practitioners using real projects indicates that NRA reduces review time, and provides more accurate review on finding activities and related pay items not conforming to standards, and reminding users of important but often omitted activities.
Boiler erection scheduling using product models and case-based reasoning
(1997-09-01)
Dzeng, RJ
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Tommelein, ID
;
交大名義發表
;
土木工程學系
;
National Chiao Tung University
Contractors who repeatedly construct facilities designed by copying major parts from one project to the next find that previously developed schedules associated with those designs could be reused to schedule new work. To facilitate such reuse, project characteristics must be articulated and associated schedules described to include not only traditional, numerical scheduling data, but also scheduling constraints. In addition, knowledge about how to reuse schedules must be available. The CasePlan system, presented here, supports and augments the scheduling activity of people who reason about cases-each case describing the design and schedule of a completed project-to generate new project schedules. Specifically, CasePlan reuses annotated cases to automatically schedule the erection of power plant boilers. Because such boilers have a more-or-less standardized design, a generic boiler product model can serve as the basis for assessing similarities between designs. On this basis CasePlan selects schedules for reuse. A user can also interact with CasePlan to isolate fragments of case schedules and adapt them to better suit the variables of the new project at hand.
Critiquing contractors' scheduling by integrating rule-based and case-based reasoning
(2004-09-01)
Dzeng, RJ
;
Lee, HY
;
土木工程學系
;
Department of Civil Engineering
Nowadays, projects involve many activities. Hence, the review process requires the scheduler to be experienced both in field operations and in computer scheduling software. However, the dilemma faced by contractors is that many senior project managers are experienced in the field but not in computers, whereas many young engineers are skilled in computers but not in field operations. This work proposes a generalized framework to represent schedule knowledge, and a computer-based system that analyzes a project schedule and offers corrective advice on potential errors by integrating case-based and rule-based reasoning. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Identifying a design management package to support concurrent design in building wafer fabrication facilities
(2006-06-01)
Dzeng, RJ
;
土木工程學系
;
Department of Civil Engineering
Concurrent design is commonly used in building a semiconductor wafer fabrication facilities to shorten projects. Current practice in managing a design schedule involves preset milestones that represent percentages of completion. Such a simple control scheme does not provide sufficient information to support concurrent design. This study presents an analytical model that applies a cluster identification algorithm to separate the work of designing a multisystem project into management packages that support concurrent design. Tasks within a package have strong informational dependency relationships on each other, and are not suited for concurrent design. Tasks of different packages have weak dependency relationships on each other, and are suited for concurrent design. Tendering design work based on these packages may reduce the number of design interfaces between participating design firms. Possible application of the model includes the management of design schedule, design contract tendering, and design information flow.
Intelligent agent for supporting construction procurement negotiation
(2004)
Dzeng, RJ
;
土木工程學系
;
Department of Civil Engineering
Negotiation is commonly required in the procurement of construction materials for general contractors. However, people often reach suboptimal agreements, thereby "leaving money on the table". As E-commerce is becoming popular, an automated system that could evaluate bids, conduct negotiation to finalize the bid, and value the characteristics of negotiating parties would be useful to both contractor and suppliers. This paper presents an agent-based system that allows negotiating parties to define their preferences of negotiable issues and options, and suggests the most beneficial agreement using the genetic algorithm. Experiments were also conducted to evaluate the system's performance on effectiveness and efficiency.
Intelligent agents for supporting construction procurement negotiation
(2004-07-01)
Dzeng, RJ
;
Lin, YC
;
土木工程學系
;
Department of Civil Engineering
Negotiation is commonly required to reach a final contractual agreement in construction material procurement. However, even simple negotiations often result in suboptimal agreements, thus 'leaving money on the table.' An automated system that could evaluate bids, negotiate to finalize the bid, and value the individual characteristics of negotiating parties would be useful to both contractors and suppliers. This study examines common negotiable issues and options for construction material procurement, and presents an agent-based system, named C-Negotiators, that helps a contractor and suppliers to negotiate via the Internet. Genetic algorithm is used to find the most beneficial agreement for all parties. and web-based development is used to improve negotiation efficiency. Experiments also were conducted and demonstrated that C-Negotiators improved negotiation efficiency by saving negotiation time and cost, and improved negotiation effectiveness by suggesting a better agreement with higher joint payoff. Although the increase in payoff was smaller than expected, the improvement should increase for more complex negotiation problems involving more issues and options, or complicated preferences and for inexperienced negotiators. The application of the system is mainly limited by its symmetric optimization, while procurement negotiations in the construction industry are biased towards the contractor, and also by user comfort with their preferences and negotiations being monitored by the system. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Learning construction-planning knowledge from experience
(1997)
Dzeng, RJ
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Chen, WT
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土木工程學系
;
Department of Civil Engineering
The evolution of a construction product throughout ifs engineering life cycle requires many experts in different fields. A training process for a novice to become an expert requires tremendous cost and time. When an expert leaves or retires, knowledge that is accumulated through years of experience is also gone, or stored as various documents that are unorganized and hard to find. Human planners are one type of experts that require such a learning process, which is slow and inefficient. This paper uses construction-planning knowledge as an example to describe an knowledge acquisition system that extracts planning knowledge through generalization of existing construction schedules with human annotation.
Learning heuristics for determining slurry wall panel lengths
(2006-05-01)
Dzeng, RJ
;
Pan, NF
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土木工程學系
;
Department of Civil Engineering
Determining panel lengths for slurry walls is an engineering issue that involves complex geotechnical, design, and site considerations. In practice, the decision is made through a trial-and-error process. Relevant principles extracted from experts are not sufficiently detailed to generate a solution. This research proposes an inductive learning model for solving this problem. Given a new project whose panel lengths need to be determined, the model chooses similar cases from existing cases, based on case-based reasoning, performs an inductive learning, and uses correctness and coverage rates, and then static rules to verify the induced results. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Learning search keywords for construction procurement
(2005-01-01)
Dzeng, RJ
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Chang, SY
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土木工程學系
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Department of Civil Engineering
Seeking information from websites has become an essential part of a contractor's procurement undertaking. as more and more procurement websites become available on the Internet, Websites host extremely lame amounts of information: a keyword search, therefore, is often more efficient than browsing via an index. However. in order to find the desired information. it may be necessary to enter keywords using a trial-and-error process. This research recognizes that professional procurement experience can help users search website information more effectively, by using fewer keywords. and so proposes a learning model and suggestion model that can capture such experience. thus guiding inexperienced users in their search. Experiments, evaluating the performance of the system, were also conducted. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Learning search pattern for construction procurement using keyword net
(2005)
Dzeng, RJ
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Wang, SS
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土木工程學系
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Department of Civil Engineering
As more and more procurement websites become available on the Internet, seeking information from websites has become an essential part of a contractor's procurement undertaking. Several e-markets, specifically for construction, have also been established, including bLiquid.com and ProcureZone. However, most websites provide only two primary ways of searching for information, namely by index/menu or by keyword. Instead of relying on the primitive search engines found in most procurement websites, a search guide system could help a user's keyword search by reducing the number of keywords required to find the desired information. Our research recognized that professional procurement experience helped users more effectively carry out website information searches, by using fewer keywords. We planned to capture such experience in order to guide inexperienced users in their search. The research goal was to improve search effectiveness by guiding the user's search using three approaches, namely correction, specification and extension. Based on these three approaches, this research applied the following guides: correction; specification-by-equivalence; specification-by-detail; extension-by-time; extension-by-location; extension-by-team; and extension-by-component. The paper will describe how we classified users for learning credibility, and the learning framework for recording expert users' search patterns. Twelve professionals, using 14 procurement packages, with 64 items in total, evaluated the proposed framework. It will be demonstrated that the proposed learning keyword guide facilitated a dynamic, customized menu and indexing system, and reduced the number of keywords required for the professionals to find the information they desired.
Mobile construction supply chain management using PDA and bar codes
(2005-07-01)
Tserng, HP
;
Dzeng, RJ
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Lin, YC
;
Lin, ST
;
土木工程學系
Construction project control aims to effectively obtain real-time information and enhance dynamic control by utilizing information sharing and connecting involved participants of the projects to reduce construction conflicts and project delays. However, extending the construction project control system to job sites is not considered efficient because using notebooks in a harsh environment like a construction site is not particularly a conventional practice. Meanwhile, paper-based documents of the site processes are ineffective and cannot get the quick response from the office and project control center Integrating promising information technologies such as personal digital assistants (PDA), bar code scanning, and data entry mechanisms, can be extremely useful in improving the effectiveness and convenience of information flow in construction supply chain control systems. Bar code scanning is appropriate for several construction applications, providing cost savings through increased speed and accuracy of data entry. This article demonstrates the effectiveness of a bar-code-enabled PDA application, called the mobile construction supply chain management (M-ConSCM) System, that responds efficiently and enhances the information flow between offices and sites in a construction supply chain environment. The advantage of the M-ConSCM system lies not only in improving the efficiency of work for on-site engineers, but also providing the Kanban-like visual control system for project participants to control the whole project. Moreover, this article presents a generic system architecture and its implementation.
Module-based construction schedule administration for public infrastructure agencies
(2004-01-01)
Dzeng, RJ
;
Wang, WC
;
Tserng, HP
;
土木工程學系
;
Department of Civil Engineering
Infrastructure projects such as the construction of expressways are often distributed over different regions and must therefore be divided into several tendering packages. The public agencies that administrate such projects manage project packages that must be integrated. All project packages may involve similar work. However, they are carried out by different contractors each with their own scheduling practices. Standardization provides a foundation for more efficient and effective schedule integration, but cannot easily be enforced without objections from contractors. This paper presents a three-stage standardization implementation framework using modularization. A set of network modules that involve normal, repetitive, cyclic, and merging activities was developed for expressway projects. Two computer systems were developed to help contractors use these modules to create schedules, and to help the owner review schedules submitted by contractors. Experiments and a survey were also carried out to validate the proposed framework, demonstrating a significant amount of time saving and errors reduced by using network modules.
Product modelling to support case-based construction planning and scheduling
(2004-05-01)
Dzeng, RJ
;
Tommelein, ID
;
土木工程學系
;
Department of Civil Engineering
Many human schedulers create schedules by reusing past similar schedules. The retrieval and reuse of similar schedules are subjective and experience-based. This paper explores different notions of similarity required when performing different scheduling tasks. It describes the CasePlan system that helps schedulers retrieve and reuse parts of existing schedules based on a generic product model, and apply case-based reasoning to generate new schedules. The validation experiment demonstrated CasePlan's accuracy in determining individual subnetworks and activity durations, but weak performance in determining interlinks between subnetworks, which highly depends upon the availability of pertinent cases and the level of detail of project information. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Searching for better negotiation agreement based on genetic algorithm
(2005-07-01)
Dzeng, RJ
;
Lin, YC
;
土木工程學系
;
Department of Civil Engineering
Negotiation is commonly required in the procurement of construction materials to reach the final contractual agreement. In current practice, contractors negotiate with suppliers according to negotiators' experiences instead of extensive exploration of negotiable options and negotiators' preferences. Consequently, negotiators often reach suboptimal agreements, and leave money on the table. This research intends to help negotiators explore negotiable options by developing a computer system, named C-Negotiator, using the genetic algorithm. This article also describes experiments conducted to determine how much money was left on the table on typical realistic construction procurements. The result shows that C-Negotiator's negotiation improved the joint payoff of the contractor and supplier from 1.5% to 9.8% compared with conventional human negotiation. The improvement may increase for more complex negotiation problems with more options and complicated preferences or for inexperienced negotiators.