Browsing by Author "Botha, Louis Johan"
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- ItemData mining construction project information to aid project management(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2018-12) Botha, Louis Johan; Wium, Jan; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Engineering. Dept. of Civil Engineering.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Internationally, the popularity of data mining and its use in a business context has grown rapidly in many sectors. The organisations that utilise data mining have experienced significant gains in efficiency, productivity and profitability. The utilisation of data mining within the construction industry has however lagged behind other sectors, especially in South Africa. Data mining to aid project management has seen limited application. The leader in applying data mining to improve project management has been the software development sector as it is plagued by project cost and time overruns and a high number of failed projects. The construction industry in South Africa suffers from similar cost and time overruns, yet data mining in the construction sector has been limited. Few applications exist of data mining to improve the management of construction projects. The process followed to implement a data mining application has been largely focused on the specific statistical and technical details of the data preparation and the data mining model. These details are inherently application specific and do not provide a general data mining process. Guides that define and demonstrate the general data mining process are limited or outdated, with no such guide existing for data mining in the construction sector. The research examines the application of data mining to the construction sector and to the improvement of project management in the software development sector. From these sources and a discussion of construction projects in South Africa, a comprehensive data mining process is synthesised. The data mining process is discussed in the context of the construction sector in South Africa and construction sector personnel with limited experience of data mining. A number of user-friendly, yet rigorous, data mining resources are presented. A selection of these resources are applied to a real project dataset obtained from the Western Cape Government’s Department of Public Works’ internal project database. A data mining application is developed by adhering to the data mining process defined within the research. The results were discussed along with several salient lessons learned.