Context-driven ontology-based risk identification for onshore wind farm projects: A domain-specific approach

Risk identification is a knowledge-based process that requires the time-consuming and laborious identification of project-specific risk factors. Current practices for risk identification in construction rely heavily on an expert’s subjective knowledge of the current project and of similar historical projects to determine if a risk may affect the project under study. When quantitative risk-related data are available, they are often stored across multiple sources and in different types of documents complicating data sharing and reuse. The present study introduces an ontology-based approach for construction risk identification that maps and automates the representation of project context and risk information, thereby enhancing the storage, sharing, and reuse of knowledge for the purpose of risk identification. The study also presents a novel wind farm construction project risk ontology that has been validated by a group of industry experts. The resulting ontology-based risk identification approach is able to accommodate project context in the risk identification process and, through implementation of the proposed approach, has identified risk factors that affect the construction of onshore wind farm projects.