Automated Prioritization of Construction Project Requirements using Machine Learning and Fuzzy Logic System

Construction inspection is a crucial stage that ensures that all contractual requirements of a construction project are verified. The construction inspection capabilities among state highway agencies have been greatly affected due to budget reduction. As a result, efficient inspection practices such as risk-based inspection are required to optimize the use of limited resources without compromising inspection quality. Automated prioritization of textual requirements according to their criticality would be extremely helpful since contractual requirements are typically presented in an unstructured natural language in voluminous text documents. The current study introduces a novel model for predicting the risk level of requirements using machine learning (ML) algorithms. The ML algorithms tested in this study included naïve Bayes, support vector machines, logistic regression, and random forest. The training data includes sequences of requirement texts which were labeled with risk levels (such as very low, low, medium, high, very high) using the fuzzy logic systems. The fuzzy model treats the three risk factors (severity, probability, detectability) as fuzzy input variables, and implements the fuzzy inference rules to determine the labels of requirements. The performance of the model was examined on labeled dataset created by fuzzy inference rules and three different membership functions. The developed requirement risk prediction model yielded a precision, recall, and f-score of 78.18%, 77.75%, and 75.82%, respectively. The proposed model is expected to provide construction inspectors with a means for the automated prioritization of voluminous requirements by their importance, thus help to maximize the effectiveness of inspection activities under resource constraints.