營建專案重要的目標之一為工程品質管理，而工程品質的好壞取決於該專案中業主需求與各項規範要求被滿足程度高低。在品質管理的工具與技術中，特性要因分析為探索問題根本原因的系統性解析技術，是在品質管理實務作業上常被應用的重要技術之一。由於特性要因分析需仰賴專業團隊共同討論、腦力激盪，然而這些專業知識難以取得，並無系統性的分類保管，使得過去的經驗與知識沒有有效的方法加以保存與再利用，且執行分析效率不理想，因此本研究旨在應用知識本體論建模，建立一系統讀取特性要因分析之知識本體模型，並進行推理，自動產生由已知之經驗與知識構成的特性要因圖，以提升實務人員進行特性要因分析作業之效率，且同時保存及推理特性要因分析之歷史成果。專案人員可藉此系統迅速找出工程品質問題之要因，減少蒐集歷史資料所耗費之時日，更能及時掌握問題，有效率的利用特性要因分析進行工程品質管理，以滿足業主與使用者之需求。;Quality management is one of the important goals in the construction industry, and the quality degree of the project depends on whether the owner’s needs and various regulatory requirements are met in the project or not. Cause and effect (CE) analysis is one of the tools and techniques for quality management. It is widely used in construction quality management practices for identifying all possible causes associated with a particular problem. CE analysis requires participation and brainstorming of domain experts and experienced practitioners; however, such a brainstorming session is usually time-consuming and labor-intensive, making the CE analysis process inefficient. Therefore, this research project aims at improving the efficiency and effectiveness of performing CE analysis by proposing an ontology-based approach to formally organize and reason about the CE analysis knowledge of domain experts and practitioners to benefit the reutilization of the knowledge. The following steps will be taken to execute this research project: understanding and analyzing the features and compositions of CE analysis knowledge; establishing a CE analysis knowledge base with ontological modeling technique; creating a prototype system for reasoning about and retrieving CE analysis knowledge from the knowledge base; and collecting real CE analysis cases from the industries to validate the proposed approach and to demonstrate the pros and cons of the approach. The expected results of this research project include.
