Content area
Abstract
There is a concern that the fragmented and decontextualized nature of the construction management (CM) curricula (McCabe et.al. 2000, Sawhney et.al. 2001) does not adequately prepare students far the industry. In order to do so we feel it is imperative to examine the nature of learning in the CM domain. How do novice construction managers learn? How do they build intuition through experience? Most importantly, what tools do we have that will allow us to train novice construction managers and provide educators with answers to the above questions. This research effort proposes that agent-driven situational simulations provide us with such tools, because they provide an interactive, dynamic, contextually rich, self organizing environment in which participants can explore “what-if” scenarios and test the validity of their decisions. The focus of this dissertation was to develop and test a general-purpose multi-agent framework that can be used by a community of developers to create situational simulations for the construction management domain.
Conceptually the framework is based on the understanding that problems in the construction management domain can be expressed as constraint satisfaction problems (CSP) and the constraints can be categorized as either temporal or resource constraints. The formal foundations of the multi-agent framework are set in the semantics of interval temporal logic (Allen, J. F. & Ferguson, G., 1994) that allows us to represent construction activities and events as intervals that are bounded by time points. The framework provides a grammar for autonomous agents to use for their interaction. The autonomous agents can communicate and reason about the evolution of the simulation, while being sympathetic to user interaction. The grammar also forms the basis of an API that can be used by developers to create their own special purpose situational simulations. The Virtual Coach, an interactive situational simulation was implemented and tested using the proposed multi-agent framework in Sun Java 1.4.2 SDK.
