The Development of a Web-based Decision Support System for Construction Claim Management

Recently, construction claims have been increased for protecting the rights of construction participants and effectively adjusting the changes under the contract. Thus, the importance of claim management has been emphasized in the construction industry. In domestic construction industry, some claim issues involved in construction activities are often being developed into disputes and even litigations because of the absence of methods or systems for the dispute resolution, and the lack of judicial precedents which can be provided as the references for resolving a particular dispute. In general, the judicial precedents related to the disputes and litigations occurred among construction participants would be extremely valuable in evaluating and analyzing current claims issues. However, such useful information has not been effectively accumulated and utilized in resolving the similar or sometimes identical types of disputes, thus requiring a large amount of additional costs, time and efforts. The primary objective of this study is to propose a web-based decision support system for construction claim management, which enables contractual participants to easily access and use the information of the judicial precedents related to the current construction claims. The decision support system is composed of 'prevention' and 'settlement' modules for avoiding and systematically resolving the construction claims.