Developing computerzed construction claims decision support system to raise ability of construction management team against claims

The increase in frequency of construction claims and the litigation costs is forcing the construction industry to develop and implement systematic approach to reduce claims occurrence and hence decrease the risk of costly litigation. Construction claims are very complex to be fully comprehended manually by human experience, there is a need to a computerized decision support system to assist managers to make decision. Artificial intelligence,expert systems, and data base building techniques have a great potential tosolve these kinds of complex problems. This thesis introduce a constructionclaims decision support system (CCDSS) to reduce claims in constructionprojects based on the knowledge driven decision support system. The proposed system consists of six components, the user, the user interface, the dialog generation & management system, the data base management system, the model base management system and the expert system. The strategy of the developed system is based on recording certain attributes of different activities and events during the construction phase and using the expert system knowledge to give specific advice to the user. Any changes in work package is compared with the initial work items and conditions between project parties at contracting stage which are stored in data bases. Changes will be categorized according to Decision trees to enter to expert system which chooses the suitable advice and actions retrieved from the data bases built by user or built in system or together. The system is presenting the full history documents during the construction. Decision trees are the presentationof all probable cases of events which may occur during the project and lead toconstruction claims. Decision trees are the way to expert system and theoutput of the decision trees will be the input of expert system. The system was implemented using visual basic programming language and capable of workin developing environment of data base system of Microsoft access. Thesystem was tested and evaluated in infrastructure projects and the resultswere satisfactory.