In recent years, effective communication among project participants has been regarded as one of the critical factors for achieving project success. Participants in a multi-contract project acquire external real-time information from other involved parties, and use this to make appropriate decisions in regard to project control. Due to the large number of decisions to be made during the construction phase, each of which requires information of different types and amounts, project participants use computers to facilitate these decision-makings. However, there exists two major obstacles to automate gaining efficient access to external information in a distributed data environment for project participants: (1) the variety of data structures that project members’ software applications may use, and (2) the lack of an automatic mechanism for electronic data acquisition. This research proposes a novel solution named Electronic Acquisition Model for Project Scheduling (e-AMPS), which is an agent-based communication environment centralized in an information agent, Message Agent (MA). e-AMPS is based on four elements for automatic communication designed by this research: (1) An ontology for automatic communication called Schema for Project Scheduling (SPS) defined in extensible markup language schema (XML Schema), (2) a data-retrieving language called Data Acquisition Language for Scheduling (DALS), (3) a searching algorithm to reach data source in a tree-like contact structure, Hierarchy Searching Algorithm (HSA), and (4) an automatic data transfer mechanism called Message Transfer Chain (MTC). Each participant of the same project equips a Message Agent as his unique information window to automatically acquire external information and provide other participants with scheduling information as well, which builds an automatic communication environment for multi-contract projects to solve the above-mentioned problems, and thus achieve automatic communication for project scheduling.

In recent years, effective communication among project participants has been regarded as one of the critical factors for achieving project success. Participants in a multi-contract project acquire external real-time information from other involved parties, and use this to make appropriate decisions in regard to project control. Due to the large number of decisions to be made during the construction phase, each of which requires information of different types and amounts, project participants use computers to facilitate these decision-makings. However, there exists two major obstacles to automate gaining efficient access to external information in a distributed data environment for project participants: (1) the variety of data structures that project members’ software applications may use, and (2) the lack of an automatic mechanism for electronic data acquisition. This research proposes a novel solution named Electronic Acquisition Model for Project Scheduling (e-AMPS), which is an agent-based communication environment centralized in an information agent, Message Agent (MA). e-AMPS is based on four elements for automatic communication designed by this research: (1) An ontology for automatic communication called Schema for Project Scheduling (SPS) defined in extensible markup language schema (XML Schema), (2) a data-retrieving language called Data Acquisition Language for Scheduling (DALS), (3) a searching algorithm to reach data source in a tree-like contact structure, Hierarchy Searching Algorithm (HSA), and (4) an automatic data transfer mechanism called Message Transfer Chain (MTC). Each participant of the same project equips a Message Agent as his unique information window to automatically acquire external information and provide other participants with scheduling information as well, which builds an automatic communication environment for multi-contract projects to solve the above-mentioned problems, and thus achieve automatic communication for project scheduling.

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION.......................................1
1.1 BACKGROUND................................................1
1.2 PROBLEM STATEMENTS........................................2
1.3 OBJECTIVES................................................4
1.4 METHODOLOGY...............................................4
1.5 FLOWCHART OF RESEARCH.....................................6
1.6 STRUCTURE OF DISSERTATION.................................7
CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW..................................8
2.1 SCHEDULING PROCESS FOR MULTI-CONTRACT PROJECTS............8
2.2 COLLABORATIVE SCHEDULING.................................11
2.3 INTELLIGENT AGENT........................................12
2.3.1 Definition.............................................12
2.3.2 Agent Applications.....................................14
2.4 AGENT COMMUNICATION LANGUAGE.............................14
2.5 EXTENSIBLE MARKUP LANGUAGE (XML).........................16
2.5.1 Markup Language........................................16
2.5.2 Stylesheet Language....................................19
2.6 SUMMARY..................................................21
CHAPTER 3 METHODOLOGY.......................................22
3.1 SCOPE AND DEFINITIONS....................................22
3.1.1 Communication for Collaborative Scheduling.............23
3.1.2 Messages...............................................25
TIME MILESTONE...............................................27
3.1.3 Communication Network..................................27
3.2 FRAMEWORK OF METHODOLOGY.................................31
3.2.1 Concept................................................31
3.2.2 Framework of the Methodology...........................34
3.3 ARCHITECTURE OF E-AMPS...................................35
3.3.1 Overview...............................................35
3.3.2 Message Agent..........................................38
3.3.3 DALS-speaking Decision Support Systems for Scheduling..40
3.4 OPERATION................................................41
3.4.1 Overview...............................................41
3.4.2 Message Manipulation...................................44
CHAPTER 4 DEVELOPMENT OF MESSAGE AGENT......................48
4.1 OVERVIEW.................................................48
4.2 XML SCHEMA FOR SCHEDULING (XSS)..........................48
4.3 DATA ACQUISITION LANGUAGE FOR SCHEDULING (DALS)..........54
4.4 HIERARCHY SEARCHING ALGORITHM (HSA)......................59
4.4.1 Searching in the Communication Network.................59
4.4.2 Hierarchy Searching Algorithm (HSA)....................61
4.5 MESSAGE TRANSFER CHAIN (MTC).............................66
CHAPTER 5 IMPLEMENTATION & SCENARIO.........................70
5.1 IMPLEMENTATION OF MESSAGE AGENT 1.0......................70
5.1.1 Developing Tools and Features..........................70
5.1.2 Directories and Configurations.........................77
5.1.3 Core Objects and their behaviors.......................80
5.2 SCENARIO.................................................91
CHAPTER 6 CONCLUSION.......................................106
6-1 CONCLUSION..............................................106
6-2 FUTURE WORK.............................................108
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT.............................................110
REFERENCE ...................................................110
APPENDIX....................................................114

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