Designing a framework to improve time series data of construction projects: application of a simulation model and singular spectrum analysis

During a construction project life cycle, project costs and time estimations contribute greatly to baseline scheduling. Besides, schedule risk analysis and project control are also influenced by the above factors. Although many papers have offered estimation techniques, little attempt has been made to generate project time series data as daily progressive estimations in different project environments that could help researchers in generating general and customized formulae in further studies. This paper, however, is an attempt to introduce a new simulation approach to reflect the data regarding time series progress of the project, considering the specifications and the complexity of the project and the environment where the project is performed. Moreover, this simulator can equip project managers with estimated information, which reassures them of the execution stages of the project although they lack historical data. A case study is presented to show the usefulness of the model and its applicability in practice. In this study, singular spectrum analysis has been employed to analyze the simulated outputs, and the results are separated based on their signal and noise trends. The signal trend is used as a point-of-reference to compare the outputs of a simulation employing S-curve technique results and the formulae corresponding to earned value management, as well as the life of a given project

A Decision Support System for Stakeholder Management during Different Project Phases considering Stakeholders’ Personality Types and Available Resources (The Case of Behsama Web-Based Information System)

A common mistake in the management of information technology projects is paying attention only to the technical issues and neglecting other areas of the project management. A critical area in information technology projects is the stakeholder management, which has been the focal point of many recent researches in the project management field. Thus, a decision support system (DSS) has been developed in this paper, consisting of a 10-stage operational process that leads to an executive plan for responding to the stakeholders’ expectations. The proposed DSS benefits from an optimization model that considers not only cost and time constraints, but also the possibility of partly fulfilling the stakeholders’ needs and expectations. The most important innovations in the development of this DSS are: considering the different phases of the project (planning, implementation and closing); and also, considering the personality types of contact persons in each stakeholder group. The proposed system has been implanted in a national IT project and the results have been presented in three categories, i.e. criteria and stakeholders, cost and time, and the results of the proposed model

An Adaptive Forward Collision Warning Framework Design Based On Driver Distraction

Forward Collision Warning (FCW) is a promising Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) to mitigate rear-end collisions. The deterministic FCW approaches may occasionally lead to the issuance of annoying false warnings, as they cannot be individualized for different drivers. This application oversight, which may cause the driver to deactivate the system, has been tackled with some adaptive methods. However, driver distraction, which is one of the most influential driver-specific factors on FCW warnings acceptability, has not been considered yet and is analyzed in this paper for the first time. Specifically, the adaptive FCW method proposed in this paper generates the warnings by continuously comparing Time Headway with a flexible threshold. The core of the proposed threshold updating mechanism is a real-time monitoring of the driver reactions against the previously generated warnings using the available indicators such as braking history. This method considers the driver distraction in parallel to fine-tune the calculated threshold in accordance with driver cognitive state. In order to incorporate the driver distraction in the system framework, a learning-based approach is designed which continuously estimates driver distraction by the virtue of different available Controller Area Network (CAN) bus time series, such as throttle pedal position, velocity, acceleration, and yaw rate. Neural network, as a widely adopted classification method, is nominated to detect driver distraction. The framework performance is evaluated over two realistic driving datasets. An approximately 80% false warning reduction is observed in analyzed safe scenarios, while no critical warning is missed in the dangerous ones

An Adaptive Forward Collision Warning Framework Design Based on Driver Distraction

Forward Collision Warning (FCW) is a promising Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) to mitigate rear-end collisions. The deterministic FCW approaches may occasionally lead to the issuance of annoying false warnings, as they cannot be individualized for different drivers. This application oversight, which may cause the driver to deactivate the system, has been tackled with some adaptive methods. However, driver distraction, which is one of the most influential driver-specific factors on FCW warnings acceptability, has not been considered yet and is analyzed in this paper for the first time. Specifically, the adaptive FCW method proposed in this paper generates the warnings by continuously comparing Time Headway with a flexible threshold. The core of the proposed threshold updating mechanism is a real-time monitoring of the driver reactions against the previously generated warnings using the available indicators such as braking history. This method considers the driver distraction in parallel to fine-tune the calculated threshold in accordance with driver cognitive state. In order to incorporate the driver distraction in the system framework, a learning-based approach is designed which continuously estimates driver distraction by the virtue of different available Controller Area Network (CAN) bus time series, such as throttle pedal position, velocity, acceleration, and yaw rate. Neural network, as a widely adopted classification method, is nominated to detect driver distraction. The framework performance is evaluated over two realistic driving datasets. An approximately 80% false warning reduction is observed in analyzed safe scenarios, while no critical warning is missed in the dangerous ones