Development Of An Information System For Materials Management In High-Speed Railway Construction

Enrterprises for high-speed railway construction befor station are a special and important kind of enterprises pf construction. For such enterprises, materials cost about70%of the total of a project, and materials management is the kernel of cost control.However, no report has been seen on the application of information systems for materials management specific for this kind of enterprises, in spite of the fact that high-speed railways are constructed rapidly in China and all over the world and the fact that railway construction costs extremely high, uses very many kinds of materials, and involses a great number of partners. Since timely and accurate data are the foundation of effective management, it is therefor of great practical and fundamental significance to develop an information system for materials management specific for high railway constructors。This thesis used certain high speed railway constructor as the prototype target system, and developed an information system for materials management on the level of project headquater and its affiliated persons, companies, materials, funds, various pieces of equipment. Three creative contributions have been achieved:(1) A detailed investigation was conducted about the project headquater and its affiliated persons, companies, materials, funds, various pieces of equipment, the complex relationship among these items, and the operational rules of this target system. Baed upon the investigation, a detailed model was abstracted and created for describing the entities and behaviors of the taget system with the help of entity-relation diagrams (ERDs) and data flow diagrams (DFDs).(2) A operational mode was created for the operation of the headquater-controlled system which combined both the operators habits and the features of management based on the web and computers. The created mode is well designed and completely realized in the layers of database and program realization with help of Unified Modeling Language (UML).(3) Significant social and economic effects were obtained in the application of the developed information system to the project headquarter of Guizhou section of Shanghai-Kunming High Speed Railway,22nd Bureau of China Railway Co. The usefulness of the information system was many folds such as risk discovery and alarm, management analysis, purchasing assistance and reduction of business affairs.