A telepresence environment for concurrent life-cycle design and construction

Construction projects normally involve transient 'virtual organisations', where a multidisciplinary project team works together on the design and construction of a facility. Many of these participants often work independently while taking decisions that inevitably affect others. The research described in the thesis involved examining the adoption of concurrent engineering (CE) principles by the construction industry as a way to reduce the problems posed by the fragmentation of the industry, and to enhance its competitiveness. An important aspect of concurrent engineering in construction is the need for effective communication of design information between all members of the project team and across all stages of the constructed facility's life-cycle. The thesis describes the development of a communications infrastructure for Concurrent Life-Cycle Design and Construction. A communications infrastructure for virtual construction project teams could greatly benefit from the application of Telepresence. Within a collaborative communications setting, Telepresence can be viewed as 'the facility which enables collaborating parties to be virtually located within a given (SD) environment, in which they are able to interact with one another or with virtual objects that are also present in that environment'. The intended aim of this being to create the illusion of ‘being there'. An approach to implement a Telepresence technology in construction was developed as part of the European CICC (Collaborative Integrated Communications for Construction) project and this is described. Building upon this, a conceptual architecture for an advanced Telepresence Environment is developed. This architecture is used as the basis for a concept demonstrator that illustrates how the environment would be used. An evaluation exercise with the aim of determining how appropriate the adoption of systems such as that which the demonstrator illustrates is then described. The evaluation established that: the environment and the features within it do support Telepresence; the methods used to deliver information about people and project data are both appropriate and suitably well-implemented; the environment provides commuhication tools that are useful and well integrated; the user is supported in fulfilling their project role with an improved awareness of project participants and activities; the adoption of the environment would improve the prospect of a project achieving, at least, some of the goals of Concurrent Engineering; and the environment would be widely used by design and management teams. It is concluded that the Telepresence Environment is a unique and innovative approach to enabling communication on construction projects. The use of Telepresence technology is an effective way of facilitating communication within a Concurrent Life-Cycle Design and Construction environment. Its use within a communications infrastructure for Concurrent Life- Cycle Design and Construction projects will transfonn the industry, enabling the goals of Concurrent Engineering to be achieved. In particular, it will facilitate collaboration on projects by making it easier to access both project information and project participants.