SQIT3033

KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION IN DECISION MAKING

GROUP A
INDIVIDUAL ASSIGNMENT 1
UTILIZING DATA MINING APPLICATION IN
CONSTRUCTION PROJECT
LECTURER: DR. IZWAN NIZAL B. MOHD SHAHARANEE
NAME: NUR SYAZWANI BT MOHD NIZAM
MATRIC NO: S212360
DUE DATE: 6TH MARCH 2014

1.0 Data Mining and Its Application

Data mining or also known as knowledge discovery is a process of analysing data from
different perspectives into useful information or knowledge. Data mining allows users to
analyse data from many different dimensions, categorize the data and come up with a
relationship between the data. We can also say that data mining is the process of finding
correlations among dozens of fields in large relational databases.

Now, data mining has been widely used by companies which focus on their customers
such as communication, financial and construction organizations. Data mining enables
these companies to determine the relationship between the internal factors and external
factors and also the impacts on sales, customer satisfaction and profit.

2.0 Utilizing Data Mining Application in Construction Projects

Construction projects such as construction of housing area, hotels, shops or buildings
need more or less the same methods and guidelines. Data mining can be applied in many
areas of construction projects such as resources, environment, bidding, weather forecast
and loans.

For example, in a construction project of a housing area, we will need a lot of resources
such as bricks, cement, manpower and sand. These resources come from different
suppliers. A huge construction company will have many suppliers for each resource

because the construction company may have done many projects before. They will keep
the data of each resource and their respective suppliers and prices in the same database.
For instance, in the resource-supplier database, it will contain data of the resources such
as bricks, sand and cement and their respective supplier, prices and grade of the resource.
Also, it will contain for example the manpower and the day they are free to work. This
database may have a few hundred records of each resource.

Then, to choose the most appropriate supplier of the resources to do a certain construction
project, say a housing area, the contractor can select the appropriated supplier by filtering
the records. For example, the contractor wants a grade A bricks with price range of
RM10-RM20 per brick, 5kg of sand with price range of RM15-RM30 per kilo, 15kg of
cement with price range of RM50-RM70 and 30 workers who are able to work on
Monday until Thursday.
After we filter the data based on the criteria that we have chosen, a series of data with
only our required criteria will appear together with their respective suppliers. Some of
these data might contain missing values so the contractor will need to clean the record by
deleting all the resources with missing values. Hence, we will obtain a new cleaned
record with our selected criteria. The contractor can use the algorithm of Instance
Learning (classification) to generate his desired result.

Then, a new generated data model will appear. The contractor can select the suppliers for
bricks, cement and sand based on the cleaned record to build the housing area for their
project. Apart from that, the contractor can also choose the 30 workers that are available
from Monday to Thursday.

3.0 Reference
1. http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/jason.frand/teacher/technologies/palace/datami
ning.htm
2. http://technology.infomine.com/reviews/epcm/welcome.asp?view=full

3. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=993005