Infrastructure project planning : progress in contemporary decision support tools

Most infrastructure project developments are complex in nature, particularly in planning phase. During this stage, many vague alternatives occur - from the strategic to operational level. Human judgement and decision making are characterized by biases, errors and the use of heuristics. These factors are intangible and hard to measure because they are subjective and qualitative in nature. The problem of human judgement becomes more complex when a group of people are involved. The variety of different stakeholders may cause conflict due to differences in personal judgements. Hence, the available alternatives increase and contribute to the complexities of the decision making process. Therefore, it is desirable to find ways of enhancing the efficiency of decision making to avoid such misunderstandings and conflict within organisations. As a result, numerous attempts have been made to solve problems in this area by leveraging technologies such as Decision Support System (DSS). However, most construction project management DSSs only concentrate on model development and leave few fundamentals of computing such as requirement engineering, communication, data management and human centred computing. Thus, DSSs are complicated and are less efficient in supporting the decision making of project team members. It is desirable for DSSs to provide more simplicity, a better collaborative platform, efficient data manipulation and adequate reflection of user needs. A framework for a more desirable DSS environment is presented. In addition, some key issues related to DSS implementation are also described.