A shared resource concept for semantically aligning cost and time domains in construction projects

In the construction industry, project scheduling and cost estimation are strongly interconnected by their nature. However, this interconnection is primarily neglected in their virtual representations in building models and the accompanying data schemes for cost data and schedules. In current projects, there is usually only a relation defined between the building model and the cost on the one hand and the building model and the schedule on the other hand. This results in a duplication of resource definitions: once by costing, which allocates resources to labour, equipment and similar entities, and again by scheduling, which assigns resources to the same elements. These resources usually contradict each other because different people with different viewpoints and interpretations of the project define them. Thus, a plausibility check is inevitable. Therefore, the cost and time domains are mapped into the realm of linked data, where they are represented as ontologies. For the time domain, the Digital Twin Construction (DTC) ontology is used to describe tasks. In the cost domain, we build on the authors’ previous work by encoding a cost ontology in OWL. Next, both ontologies are aligned with a shared concept of modeling the resource domain as an ontology itself. Already established ontology patterns will be reused. In our work, all three ontologies are eventually aligned with each other and are demonstrated in a use case that will show the advantages of sharing resource entities following the same conceptual design for the time and cost domains.