A Chatbot System for Construction Daily Report Information Management

Consistently updating, analyzing, and managing construction-related information is one of the key success factors in project management. Quite a few construction projects have recently started to utilize instant messaging (IM) applications such as Slack, WhatsApp, and WeChat as a communication channel among project participants to share daily construction information due to easy accessibility. However, general contractors are still required to manually extract and integrate the data from instant messages to compose daily reports. This is because the data inputted by subcontractors through IM applications are usually in an unstructured form and the IM application is not normally interoperable with the systems database especially developed for construction management. To solve this problem, this study proposes a chatbot-assisted construction daily report data management system. The chatbot in the proposed system collects and processes the required information through conversations with subcontractors, and automatically generates and shares a daily report for general contractors. A prototype system has been designed and implemented to prove the concept.