Developing a decision support system for building project procurement

The growing need for improved construction procurement and managerial systems, point to the usefulness of a knowledge-based advisory system to help optimise such decisions, amidst the multiplicity of project variables. This new system would harness lessons learnt from past and present research and practice. A Hong Kong based study on a sample of different building projects and professionals, has yielded 'knowledge' that has been analysed and structured into pilot/sample core modules of a proposed knowledge-based decision support system. Results from statistical analysis of the data and an Artificial Neural Network model confirmed the value of the proposed system. An extended study to gather more data/knowledge is recommended to further develop the proposed system, using the methodology presented in this paper. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.