ABSTRACT

Construction works require an immense number of project partners respectively involved building trades. Traditional cooperation between these trades respectively the involved craftsmen and tasks like the determination of quantities, creation of parts lists, work scheduling etc. are in most cases done by hand based on traditional information resources (i.e. semi-or unstructured documents like construction drawings, specifications for building systems etc.) especially in the surrounding of small and medium-sized companies till this day. Efficient search and retrieval of information which are needed for a particular work task can hardly be performed and require additional effort for manual rework since the relevant information is distributed in different documents that have to be searched trough and integrated manually. Also the change in used (proprietary) data formats (e.g. for floor plans and construction drawings, bill of quantities and work plans) and the integration of these different information resources causes different problems. On the one hand additional synchronization problems occur if information which is not stored centralized is changed. On the other hand required conversion between different formats is a problem as well. These tasks and problems are solved mostly by hand which is very time consuming and error-prone.