Overview of Decision Support Systems Applied to Construction

Background

Although the concepts of decision support systems has been around for centuries, researchers actually began to systematically study and use decision-making and planning systems in the 1960’s (Raymond, 1966; Turban, 1967; Urban, 1967). Decision support systems have been applied to various industries including health, banking, aviation, motor, economy, construction, etc. There is a substantial amount of evidence that suggests human intuitive judgment and decision-making can be far from optimal and deteriorates even further with complexity and stress. With regards to construction, the domain is very knowledge intensive. Decisions are often made about the different construction materials, equipment/plants, manpower, and methods to be used in a given construction projects. Furthermore, the decision making process is exacerbated by often too many occurring problems on construction sites. A summary of the different parameters that affect decision making on construction sites are presented in Table 1.