Abstract

Construction projects' information, in the most part, is document-based. This information documents progress and performance, also supports daily activities. The industry has not paid enough attention to establishing a framework for capturing and storing project's document-based information, which is necessary for substantiating claims' facts. Eventually high "post-construction" dispute resolution costs became the norm, especially in complex construction projects. Understanding the history of such undertakings--without documents--is an enormous one, because to understand the actual history of a project, all-relevant documents have to be available. The outcome and resolution of construction performance-related disputes rely, almost exclusively, on relevant contemporaneous documents from the periods concerned. However, documents sprawling to various project locations without discernable directory structures complicate maintenance functions for backing up and archiving files. Construction projects are temporary organizations that rely heavily on contemporaneous documents to exchange and disseminate information, and to prove claims' causes and damages. Hence, difficulties in locating and accessing critical documents have to be minimized. Registering and cross-referencing every document that is issued by any group in the project achieves that. Currently, the industry is not unanimous on how to solve this problem and with slimming contractor profits (due to severe competition and increased modern projects' complexity) the construction industry has not invested sufficiently to develop data schemas to represent project documents' contents, or context. Modeling such information is necessary for mapping the knowledge contents into databases. This research identified the aforementioned discords and proposes a Web-Based solution; entitled the Construction Project Document Information Center ( CPDICenter ). The CPDICenter is a web-based system with communication architecture to tackle technical constraints like geographical dispersion of operations, multiplicity of project groups, and document workflows. It also allows groups to register, store, access, and search online for any documents in the project via a web browser. The CPDICenter is a project-wide document control system to capture documents from all project groups/participants. This research presents the CPDICenter's web-based workflow system for digital document capture, classification, indexing, and storage, in order to expedite finding and retrieving documents for claim preparation processes. The CPDICenter works with any project organization encompassing any number of groups. The payback will be reduced times for retrieving documents, reduced costs of printing and scanning, and consequently claims' preparation costs. This system intends to capture--in concert with contemporaneous documents--other information about project events' context, documentation rationale and process data. Accurate accounts of project events are essential for a successful and equitable claim analysis and resolution. Such information is a requisite for reconstructing any project's history and finding the causes of disruptions and/or changes to any construction program baselines especially when the people who worked in the project have left to other jobs or their memories have faded.