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Abstract
VE has become an integral aspect of the development of many major construction projects over the years. However, there are some shortcomings in the conventional VE process: (1) The use of a function analysis system technique (FAST) diagram as the basis for the VE exercise may restrain the VE team's creativity, as the FAST diagram usually provides too many details upfront regarding the lower-level project functions. (2) The creativity phase, which is the critical stage of the VE process, relies mainly on freethinking-based creativity tools, such that the chance of generating an innovative solution is limited by individual VE team members' experience, knowledge, and creativity. (3) There is a lack of direction in problem solving and a lack of effort in developing and evaluating alternative plans, both of which serve to reduce the efficiency and effectiveness of the VE exercise. (4) Finally, VE analysis usually starts from scratch without adequately utilizing the knowledge generated from previous VE exercises, which leads to an increased likelihood of "reinventing the wheel" and consequently the waste of resources. To overcome these shortcomings, this thesis first presents development of an enhanced VE framework (referred to as the TRIZ-enhanced-VE framework), which incorporates inventive problem-solving techniques (Russian abbreviation: TRIZ) in order to enhance the creative capability of the VE team and guide the VE process to effectively and efficiently generate "focused" ideas toward innovative solutions to the essential problems. Moreover, this study proposes a value engineering knowledge management system (VE-KMS) to facilitate the creativity phase of VE through live capturing, extracting, and reusing the best engineering and construction knowledge obtained from this stage. The architecture of the proposed database for VE knowledge management copes with the workflow of the creativity phase of the TRIZ-enhanced-VE study. While reviewing TRIZ theories, this research also identifies the difficulty involved in finding solutions for Substance-Field (Su-Field) analysis and therefore has condensed 76 standard solutions into seven general principles. As a result, the logic of TRIZ in general is improved and the application of Su-Field analysis becomes more efficient.