CA-FCM: Towards a formal representation of expert’s causal judgements over construction project changes

Abstract

Aimed at improving the proactive benefits of Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping (FCM) for predicting construction project changes, this paper presents CA-FCM: a Context-aware Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping approach. CA-FCM’s main functionality is to imitate the intuitive causal judgements of project experts over change causation in different contextual settings. Invoking the logical inference capabilities of semantic web tools, a hybrid inference mechanism is embedded within the proposed framework which enables establishing contextual connections between prospective causal factors through a semi-automated process of generating relevant causal statements. Hence, CA-FCM can assist decision-makers with (1) a shared sense-making of the domain concepts which would significantly facilitate the manual construction of FCM scenarios, (2) providing contextualized recommendations of causal information required for developing FCM scenarios, (3) dynamic modelling of causal inferences, imitating expert reasoning on change causation and propagation. Towards providing a detailed delineation of CA-FCM’s effectiveness on providing assistance in planning for project changes, a partial implementation of the proposed framework was conducted within a real case scenario.