The ever-increasing amount of construction problems and unnecessary redesigning work during the construction phase of highway projects with the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) has made it obvious that investigations must be made in order to improve the constructability of the designs when contract plans are prepared. The Highway Constructability Improvement System (HCIS) was developed and includes information extracted mainly from a critical search of thousands of change orders from 5 years of WSDOT highway construction projects. By using HCIS, engineers at the design office can access a bank of knowledge from past construction experiences and be alerted to the constructability aspects of their designs. This awareness of what has gone wrong in the past allows design engineers to avoid similar errors in preparing future design plans and specifications. This will improve constructability of designs at an early stage of a project. HCIS itself is a complete system, using hypertext technology, for design engineers to get constructability improvement ideas for highway construction projects. The user does not have to refer to other sources for reference while using the system. This system not only eliminates the duplication of information, but also prompts the design engineer of the interrelationship of the different highway construction aspects.

The ever-increasing amount of construction problems and unnecessary redesigning work during the construction phase of highway projects, as evident from the large number of change orders in each project, has made it obvious that investigations must be made in order to improve the constructability of the designs when contract plans are prepared. Although there is no such thing as a perfect set of contract plans, improvements in various aspects of the plans, specifications, and estimate (PS&E) process would certainly result in savings both in time and money. The problem addressed in this project is the concern for the quality of engineering design with regard to its constructability.