A Progress-based Expert System for Quantitative Assessments of Project Delay

Construction projects have frequently exceeded their schedule despite reliable estimates at the start of a project. This problem was attributed to unpredictable causes at the beginning and to shortage of proper tools to accurately predict project completion date. To supplement this difficulty, project managers need a comprehensive system that can be employed to monitor the progress of an ongoing project and to evaluate potential delay for achieving the goal on time. This paper proposed a progressive-based expert system for quantitative assessments of project delay at the early stages of the execution. Furthermore, the system is used to inspect the change of the uncertainty on completion date and its magnitude. The proposed expert system is helpful for furnishing project managers a warning signal as a project is going behind schedule and for tracking the changed uncertainty at a desired confidence level. The main objectives of this paper are to offer a new system to overcome the difficulties of conventional forecasting tools and to apply a construction project into the system to illustrate its effectiveness. This paper focuses on construction phase of project development and is intended for the use by project managers.