| Temporary structures (i.e., scaffolding, shoring) represent an area of considerable significance in the construction process, having a large influence on the quality, safety, speed, and profitability of construction projects. Therefore, they are the concern of the designer, the contractor, the building official, the insurer, the workers on site, and the general public. However, current industry practice does not have a systematic way to generate temporary structure plans due to the lack of a formalized way to represent the specific project situations and the planners' rationale to select temporary structures for a given specific project situation. Temporary structure planning is in general handled manually and is time-consuming and error-prone. Information-technology-based methods are the most promising approach to improve the timeliness, correctness, and consistency of the temporary structure planning process. Building on and extending the prior work on representing product and process information, this thesis presents a temporary structure planning ontology that formalizes the representation of specific project situations and temporary structure planning methods. The temporary structure ontology enables the development of a computer system that helps construction engineers generate temporary structure plans rapidly, consistently, and thoroughly. |
