Challenges to Engineering Management in the Big Data Era

Abstract

This paper presents a review of the challenges to engineering management in the Big Data Era as well as the Big Data applications. First, it outlines the definitions of big data, data science and intelligent knowledge and the history of big data. Second, the paper reviews the academic activities about big data in China. Then, it elaborates a number of challenging big data problems, including transforming semi-structured and non-structured data into “structured format” and explores the relationship of data heterogeneity, knowledge heterogeneity and decision heterogeneity. Furthermore, the paper reports various real-life applications of big data, such as financial and petroleum engineering and internet business.

Keywords

big data / data science / intelligent knowledge / engineering management / real-life applications

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Acknowledgments

Part of this paper has been presented at the 9th China Engineering Management Forum organized by Division of Engineering Management, Chinese Academy of Engineering, May 16–17, 2015. This work was partially supported by the key research grant “Innovative Research on Management Decision Making under Big Data Environment” (Grant No. 71331005), “Non-structured Data Analysis Methods and Key Technologies for Management Decision Making” (Grant No. 71501175) and the key international collaboration grant “Business Intelligence Methods Based on Optimization Data Mining with Applications of Financial and Banking Management” (Grant No. 71110107026) from the National Natural Science Foundation of China.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

2014 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg