Application of Fuzzy Expert Systems for Construction Labor Productivity Estimation

Fuzzy Expert Systems have been used to solve
complex problems efficiently in the case where information
available is in descriptive form rather than quantitative
number. This study has aimed to use Fuzzy expert systems to
estimate the labor production rates through incorporating
the influence of qualitative and quantitative factor.
Production rate values of concreting of columns and their
influential factors have been collected from questionnaire
survey. Overall ten influential factors of qualitative and
quantitative nature are selected for collecting the data
during questionnaire survey based on the Likert scale of 1 to 5. Fuzzy expert system developed in this study has been
compared with the two previously used Fuzzy expert systems
for productivity estimation. Performance of the previous
systems and system developed in this study has been
compared by calculating Root Mean Square Error. The
findings revealed that system developed in the study gives
high linguistic and numerical accuracies as compare to the
previous systems with least Root Mean Square Error. Hence,
the developed Fuzzy expert system can be used reliably for
estimating labor productivity by the construction Industry.