Understanding Engineering Projects: An Integrated Vehicle Health Management Approach to Engineering Project Monitoring

Due to heterogeneity in engineering projects and the contexts in which they occur, it is challenging to develop and apply generic methods for monitoring and management. Particularly in large projects, high complexity, scale, and distribution creates difficulty in identifying what performance metrics should even be applied to each, aside from assessment method. To address this issue this paper presents a new approach to project monitoring based on Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM), a widely utilised monitoring method for machine maintenance. By focusing on wide capture of low-level data, in this case Digital Objects produced during everyday work, an IVHM approach uses many analysis techniques simultaneously, automatically creating a high-level description of the state of the project, which a manager can use for assessment and intervention. To allow IVHM to be applied to engineering projects this paper presents 70 features captured from interview, each present in all engineering projects, whose state influences performance. Feasibility of the IVHM approach in engineering project management is then shown through three real-data examples, in which higher level project understanding is inferred directly from low level data.