This research is a review and analysis paper that offers a transdisciplinary, methodological, and strategic vision for soft computing development towards a wider favorable impact in data analytics. Strategies are defined, explained, and illustrated by examples. The paper also shows how these strategies are expressed in three dimensions of an ambitious actions plan. They are all integrated into a master strategy called wide knowledge discovery, which offers a way towards the augmented analytics paradigm. Some contributions of this work are defining what kind of mathematical elements should be introduced into soft computing towards a better impact on the area of data analytics, offering orientation towards building new mathematical elements, and defining why and how they can be introduced.
Construction labour productivity is a cost efficiency measure of crews in producing outputs usually at an activity level. The relationship between the factors affecting the efficiency of crews and the achieved labour productivity is being studied using various stand-alone modeling approaches like regression analysis, neural networks, and fuzzy logic-based expert systems. However, the developed models suit only a specific context and most importantly, a method for transferring and generalizing the knowledge captured in the various models has not yet been fully developed. This paper presents the application of a granular fuzzy modeling approach for transferring captured knowledge and the process of developing a granular generalized construction labour productivity model having an improved prediction capability. The granular fuzzy model abstracts three construction productivity models dealing with industrial welding activities using a case-based reasoning approach on clusters of the respective model input data prototypes. The performance of the model is evaluated using coverage and specificity plots and different model parameters are optimized.