The Application Of Data Warehouse And Data Mining In Construction Enterprises

The construction corporations will have to face the drastic competition in international market, because our country has joined in WTO. But the management and decision level of the whole construction industry is still very low at present. Most construction corporations make decisions only depending on the managers' experience. How to develop the corporation's information resources and offer decision support for a manager and decision-maker, is a key problem during the procedure of IT application in construction corporations in our country.This research will attempt to use data-warehouse and data-mining in the decision management of construction corporations, base on their actuality and requirement. An integrated system will be built to store, process and apply the historic data of construction corporations. The decision-support tools, base on the data-warehouse and data-mining system, will be developed. These systems will form a data flat for the further development of decision support system for construction corporations.This research studied the basic technology of data-warehouse and data-mining deeply, and improved them to suite the construction corporations' characters. Some key technologies have been studied, such as the technology of designing and developing the data-warehouse model and applying and exhibiting the data in data warehouse. For data mining, the share and management of data-mining models was studied, and the arithmetic of decision tree, cluster and association rule has been implemented.Via the investigation of several kinds of construction corporations in our country, the management mode and the theory and method of IT application in construction corporations was analyzed in details. The subject model of data warehouse for corporation's decision of projects and the basic frame of IT application in construction corporations has been designed, with a core decision support system base of data warehouse and data mining system.Microsoft SQL Server 2000 was chosen to be the data-warehouse server. SQL Server provides several COM interfaces to support developers' programming. Usingthese interfaces, the data-warehouse system and data-mining system was completed. The data-warehouse system, including the ETL controls and the controls for handling the multidimensional data cubes, allowed users to analyze the data in data warehouse by dill-down, rollup, pivoting, slicing, dicing and generating charts. This system also provided several tools to manage the data-mining models, and predicting data and analyzing the graph of data-mining models. According to the need of construction corporations' decisions, this system used the data-mining models to predict data in order to offer information for decision support. In this research, the analysis modules of resources, schedule, quality, safety and cost, have been developed, aiming at the decision support in these specific aspects during the construction corporations' management.This paper introduced these research and development, and gave an applying instance.