D-PIPE: A Worker Hour Rates Data Warehouse for Estimating Industrial Pipe Work Construction

摘要

Estimating pipe work, shop fabrication, and fieldwork is a time-consuming process that involves extensive data manipulation. Several systems have been developed to assist estimators in preparing their estimates for industrial construction work and planning their operations. These systems lack the support of a comprehensive database or data-warehouse to provide information about pipe configurations, the type of work involved in their preparations, and the worker-hour rate required to perform this task. Although companies compose their own worker-hour rates based on historical data, their data is not always consistent and does not follow a standard format, which creates frequent problems for estimators. This article describes a newly developed data warehouse (called D-PIPE), designed to support efficient estimating of worker-hour rates for pipe work related to industrial construction and its rehabilitation. It includes operational information about pipe configurations, job types, pipe sizes and types, and related worker-hour rates for shop-fabrication and field-erection. D-PIPE is a relational data-warehouse designed using an Entity Relation (ER) diagram; it is implemented using the SQL Server 2000 environment. A case study is presented to demonstrate the use and capabilities of D-PIPE.