AI-Based Project Similarity Evaluation Model Using Project Scope Statements

Historical data from comparable projects can serve as benchmarking data for an ongoing project's planning during the project scoping phase. As project owners typically store substantial amounts of data generated throughout project life cycles in digitized databases, they can capture appropriate data to support various project planning activities by accessing digital databases. One of the most important work tasks in this process is identifying one or more past projects comparable to a new project. The uniqueness and complexity of construction projects along with unorganized data, impede the reliable identification of comparable past projects. A project scope document provides the preliminary overview of a project in terms of the extent of the project and project requirements. However, narratives and free-formatted descriptions of project scopes are a significant and time-consuming barrier if a human needs to review them and determine similar projects. This study proposes an Artificial Intelligence-driven model for analyzing project scope descriptions and evaluating project similarity using natural language processing (NLP) techniques. The proposed algorithm can intelligently a) extract major work activities from unstructured descriptions held in a database and b) quantify similarities by considering the semantic features of texts representing work activities. The proposed model enhances historical comparable project identification by systematically analyzing project scopes.