Construction is an extremely information-dependent industry in which a project’s success largely depends on good access to and management of data. Effective project management requires the characterization of its challenging issues and the use of appropriate tools for data handling. For this purpose, the construction industry is increasingly adopting the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in recent years. Given the acknowledged potential of ICT to bring about improvements in other industries, many initiatives have been undertaken to develop appropriate tools to support various tasks during the construction project lifecycle. This paper focuses on the proposals that use ICT to provide access to the data and take advantage of this access to manage crucial issues within project management such as costs, planning, risks, safety, progress monitoring, and quality control. The authors will demonstrate that suitable data handling facilitates and improves the decision-making process an...

Project success is directly related to reliable access to accurate project data. During the construction project life cycle, an enormous amount of documents with largely interesting information are exchanged, which makes the decision-making process very complex to project managers. One of the most important documents in this context is the Bill of Quantities BoQ, which is a collection of Work Descriptions describing the nature of the different works needed to be done to achieve the project goal. As BoQs are differently built, practitioners have trouble when trying to insert them in a common database storage system, because both the linguistic descriptions and the structure of each BoQ document may be defined in a different way. In this article, we focus on this problem and present an approach to automatically extract the information from the work descriptions and to appropriately place it in a predefined hierarchical structure, independently of its original format. Our approach is based on a multicriteria aggregation process based on the use of learned information and expert knowledge. The methodology has been validated with a broad set of work descriptions. Results show that the proposal is able to classify them with success.