An INDOT Lessons Learned Constructability Program and Integrated Multimedia System

To improve constructability, experienced design and construction engineers often select processes and develop details that require less labor, equipment, or management resources to build. These innovative ideas, enabling circumstances, and their effect on the construction process are not usually recorded in a reusable format. Without such a mechanism, recalling this experience under the appropriate circumstances, or transferring the technology to new management has generally not happened. Further, civil engineers are generally educated to optimize cost by minimizing the material quantity. Through experience gained after graduation, they are expected to pick up options for engineering impact on the labor, equipment, and overhead expense. This school of experience extracts too high a price in trail and error, and the need for redevelopment of lessons learned by others. Presented is a constructability concept and lesson-learned storage and retrieval platform. This case based technical assistant, has been ergonomically designed to employ natural problem solving heuristic methods used by human experts. Within this platform, the process of locating an appropriate lesson learned matches closely the storage and retrieval mechanisms of the human long term memory. The result is lessons learned which are easy to find. Once found, the circumstances and construction processes are presented in a multimedia format that can represent all factors affecting construction cost. Human factors research was again applied to the development of this presentation system. It involves the learner, and deepens the understanding, elaborately relating the lesson to prior knowledge, which will further improve the memory recall mechanism created during the search process. DICEP (Design Integrated Construction Engineering Platform) is presented herein to effectively involve the human design engineer in the application of constructability at the right time during design