An intelligent system for the acquisition and management of information from bill of quantities in building projects

•An intelligent system for bill of quantities information management is proposed.•The system is implemented using a web-based application.•The system imports and classifies information with a high percentage of success.•The integration of bill of quantities data permits to make more reliable decisions.

Construction projects success largely depends on a good access to and management of information, which is stored in different databases and applications (even on paper). This heterogeneity makes the management and decision making process difficult. One of the most relevant documents in the project management context is the Bill of Quantities (BoQ), which is a collection of work descriptions specifying, in a textual way, the nature of the different tasks needed to be done in order to achieve the project goal. Since there are no standards for developing the BoQ, its structure and linguistics vary among practitioners, making the acquisition and management of the information contained in this document very laborious. In this paper, i-BoQ, an intelligent system for retrieving and structuring data coming from BoQ, is presented. As we will see, intelligent capabilities together with a friendly web-based application allow to easily acquire and manage integrated BoQ information for supporting decision making in the construction project management.