ABSTRACT
Construction scheduling, along with estimating, cost control and quality assurance, is an essential ingredient of effective project control. Schedules, simple and complex, bar charts and PERT diagrams, have found a niche in both design and construction project management. Although industry acceptance of CPM, resource allocation, and timecost trade-off concepts was slow in coming, the advent of mainframe computers in the 1960s and especially personal computers (PCs) in the 1980s has changed attitudes about quantitative methods of construction management. The time thus seems right for the introduction of knowledge-based expert systems (ES) to a tradition-bound field like construction (Ibbs, 1985, 1986).
