Control mechanism for information sharing in an integrated construction environment

Abstract

With the growing application of computers, the construction process is moving from a ‘paper based’ project execution to a future, fully computer based integrated environment that supports concurrent way of working. However, such a change will take a long time to complete. Atpresent, several different integration technologies co-exist at different research and development (R&D) stages. This paper identifies three types of project information integration approaches, document-based, schema-based and model-based. The characteristics of each type of system are reviewed and a comparative evaluation is presented.

Keywords Integrated construction environment, document management, data exchange, data model, concurrent engineering systems.