Structured Idea Creation for Improving the Value of Construction Design

Abstract

Value engineering (VE) is an effort to increase the value of a system through a creative and organized approach. Idea generation is the most important part in a VE job plan. Although the experts in a VE team can evaluate multiple alternatives that can replace the original idea, idea generation is usually on the basis of their knowledge and experience. A structured method will help to consider different functional perspectives and to create inventive ideas that could have been missed otherwise. This paper presents a construction value engineering inventive idea support (CVE-IIS) tool for structured idea generation in construction VE. In this study, previous VE reports were analyzed to understand the pattern of proposed ideas in highway construction design. These ideas were categorized according to the rules of advanced systematic inventive thinking (ASIT) to establish an idea breakdown structure (IBS). The IBS was then used to support the generation of construction ideas using idea-generation worksheets. A case study demonstrated that the CVE-IIS can help improve the value of design functions by improving performance.