An integrated system for change management in construction

Change management in construction is an important aspect of project management, as changes constitute a major cause of delay and disruption, and it is widely accepted by both owners and constructors that change effects are difficult to quantify and frequently lead to disputes. The development of change management systems should consider many elements of the project processes and address all internal and external factors that influence project changes. This paper presents an integrated change management system developed to represent the key decisions required to implement changes and to simulate the iterative cycles of concurrent design and construction resulting from unanticipated changes and their subsequent impacts. The system integrates a fuzzy logic-based change prediction model with the system dynamics model of the Dynamic Planning and control Methodology (DPM), which has been developed to evaluate the negative impacts of changes on construction performance. The developed system can be used in managing change scenarios on projects and also in evaluating change effects depending on the available information at the early stages of projects.