Latin American and Caribbean Consortium of Engineering Institutions

Conference Track:  Emerging Technology?

Keywords:         Program Management, Program Control, Scope Modeling

Contact Title:    Dr.

Contact First Name: Yimin

Contact Last Name:  Zhu

University:       Florida International University

Web:              www.fiu.edu

Position:         Assistant Professor

Country:          USA

Email:            zhuy@fiu.edu

Paper Title:

A Conceptual Framework of Ontology-based of Program Scope Alignment 

Abstract: 

Program management is one of the major vehicles that many owners use to deliver large scale capital projects such as airports and highway infrastructure. Such programs usually involve huge amount of investment and multiple years of planning, design and construction. Meanwhile, program management teams are often formed by various stakeholders with different background and interests. In such a dynamic environment, effective sharing and disseminating program information is critical to the success of program management. 

This paper argues that one of the major complexities of program control is dealing with project changes within a program, which in many cases is related to project scope evolution and changes especially during the planning and the design phase. Unfortunately, most of the existing AEC (Architecture Engineering Construction) software tools do not well address the issue of managing project scopes and scope changes throughout the lifecycle of a program. In addition, due to the factor that exiting AEC software tools are highly fragmented, effectively and efficiently aligning program resources, schedules and cost information to correct scopes in an ever-changing environment becomes extremely difficult, which results in  a reality that the scopes, represented by underlying data, are either not checked or checked manually. This paper intends to improve computer-mediated program control by developing a program scope model, which becomes a central point to align scopes in different data sources. Through the program scope model, other important data such as program resources, schedules and cost can be better integrated to support decision-making and knowledge extraction.  

Mailing Address: 

10555 West Flagler Street, EC 2956

Miami, FL 33174 

Phone: 

Authors: 

Dr. Yimin Zhu / zhuy@fiu.edu / Florida International University (P)

Dr. Shu-Ching Chen/ chens@fiu.edu / Florida International University /Assistant Professor