An information model for improving design coordination in building projects

Engineering design is a complex multidisciplinary process often constrained by time and money. The success of this process is highly dependent upon effective coordination among the diverse design teams involved. Despite its importance, coordination is neither simple nor error free and at present relies primarily on manual methods of cross checking. Such practice can thus be characterized as slow, costly, and ineffective. It is the objective of this research, therefore, to re-engineer the design process utilizing the recent advances in information technology and computer applications in order to facilitate coordination and increase productivity. The novelty of this research is in the development of a comprehensive model for efficiently representing multidisciplinary design information, recording design rationale, and facilitating the management of design changes. The model incorporates a unified hierarchical representation of the multidisciplinary design information. Building components are designed as intelligent objects that encapsulate their design rationale and appropriate communication paths. These components are able to automatically communicate any changes in their data to affected parties. The design rationale is represented for each component by recording the description of desired performance criteria, the minimum and maximum performance values, and the dependency relationships among components. The model also incorporates several design-change management procedures for proposing changes, sending changes, tracking changes, and following up on pending changes. To facilitate the developments of this model, an investigation into the traditional design process was conducted by means of a questionnaire survey to document the flow of design information among the participants and to elicit some of the rules-of-thumb used by expert designers to improve coordination. To demonstrate the concepts presented in this research, a prototype of a collaborative system for design coordination was developed. The proposed prototype incorporates a client/server environment and Internet-based collaboration tools for sharing documents, reviewing changes, and conferencing among remote design participants. The prototype was successfully applied to a real-world example project to demonstrate the usefulness of the model and its capabilities over current practice. The opinions of expert designers on the prototype performance were then solicited and used to both refine its components and evaluate the usefulness of the model. The perceived benefits of the developed model are expected to be improved design, higher consistency, increased productivity, and better constructability of projects. This research is expected to help design firms become highly competitive, nationally and internationally, within the open market economics being adopted worldwide.