A FRAMEWORK FOR INTELLIGENT CHANGE MANAGEMENT IN THE CONSTRUCTION PROCESS

During a project lifecycle, changes are inevitable due to various uncertainties, complexity of tasks and mobility of people involved. For effective change management, project stakeholders must know the latest changes, where the changes occur and what the impacts are in terms of time and cost. However, current internetbased project management systems always lack the flexibility to handle dynamic changes and collaborative processes. A typical scenario in handling changes is to inform all the stakeholders by broadcasting messages. This may incur two potential problems. First, the messages may be neglected due to information overload. Second, no implications of the change are suggested in the messages. This paper proposes a framework for effectively managing changes in the construction process, where ontology serves as the theory core layer, intelligent agents are in the application layer and customized workspace is presented as an interface layer. Using applications developed from this framework, users can get customer-tailored change reports and recommendations to cope with the changes.