IT Services Design to Support Coordination Practices in the Luxembourguish AEC Sector

Abstract

In the Architecture Engineering and Construction sector (AEC) cooperation between actors is essential for project success. The configuration of actors' organization takes different forms like the associated coordination mechanisms. Our approach consists in analyzing these coordination mechanisms through the identification of the "base practices" realized by the actors of a construction project to cooperate. We also try with practitioners to highlight the "best practices" of cooperation. Then we suggest here two prototypes of IT services aiming to demonstrate the value added of IT to support cooperation. These prototype tools allow us to sensitize the actors through terrain experiments and then to bring inch by inch the Luxembourgish AEC sector towards electronic cooperation.

Towards a Sustainable Services Innovation in the Construction Sector

“…The incremental development of the successive releases of the demonstrator took direct benefits of the MDE approach introduced in Section 2 and of its tailoring to the cooperation issues in AEC. The flexibility and the efficiency of this approach for a systematic derivation and evolution of new specific cooperation platforms was already proved by our previous experiences regarding the development of opensource applications, and of their related business services [2].…”

“…In Luxembourg, to answer to this need, the Public Research Centre Henri Tudor (CRPHT) has been engaged in several R&D projects, most of them in a PPP (Public/Private Partnership) approach with different stakeholders active in the sector as well as with the CRTI-B 1 , the national professional association promoting new usages of ICT in the construction sector and its associated standards. These projects have resulted in several demonstrators and prototypes [1,2], the latest one, dealing with a document management services system supporting construction projects, is the focus of this paper. Developing demonstrators is clearly an important activity in a global innovation process in order to get the support of early adopters through experiments and validation.…”

DCDS – Distant Collaborative Design Studio

“…heterogeneous participants, short-duration project periods, low-predictable and low-repeatable processes). The « CRTI-weB Document Management » tool aims to offer the essential functions for document exchange in coherence with the specificities and the semantics of cooperative design activities (Kubicki et al, 2007). It consists of a shared project space that can be accessed by all the participants of a project, through a computer connected to the Internet.…”

Toward a Trust‐Based Construction Management

“…The design of applications supporting cooperation projects is addressed in several RDI projects. In Luxembourg, the CRP Henri Tudor has developed three IT applications and their related business services (Kubicki et al, 2007a, 2009):…”