95. Ontology-Based Semantic Modeling of Disaster Resilient Construction Operations: Towards a Knowledge-Based Decision Support System

Construction sites are dynamic and complex; they are the most vulnerable environments to natural disasters such as hurricanes. Wind-caused damage to the construction sites could cause millions of dollar losses, considerable schedule delays, and threats to both worker safety and public safety. Therefore, there is sorely a need to enhance the overall resilience of construction projects and implement resilient construction operations. However, there is a lack of research that focuses on enhancing the resilience of construction operations during the construction phase as most existing research focuses on enhancing the structural resilience of the completed buildings or infrastructures. There is a lack of holistic and systematic knowledge that ensures whole life-cycle disaster management of construction projects. To address the gap, this paper aims to develop an ontology-based semantic model of disaster resilient construction operations to formally represent and reason about the knowledge of resilient construction operations during wind disasters. This paper starts by presenting the research method, and it follows by presenting our initial modeling and validation efforts towards a formal semantic model on disaster resilient construction operations. Finally, the paper discusses our proposed framework for a knowledge-based decision support system that allows for knowledge access, classification, and transfer on disaster resilient construction operations. The model, together with its potential application of the knowledge-based system would allow construction professionals to share and transfer domain-specific knowledge on construction disaster resilience, which will eventually contribute to enhance the whole life-cycle disaster resilience of construction projects.