Constructed facility

life-cycle

Design
Construct

Design
Rebuild

Use

Design
Rebuild

Use
Maintain

Demolishing
planning

Use
Maintain

Demolish
Maintain

Recycle

Construction project

Construction project

Main project phase

Sub-phase level

Construct

Design

Design

Detailed architectural design

Partition design

Task level

Sub-task level

Check partitions fire resistance

Detailed
architectural
desgin

Partition
design
Check partitions
fire resistance
Identify and
retrieve the relevent
fire regulaitons

Identify and retrieve

fire regulations
Retrieve a copy
of SmRakMK E4
Retrieve information

Figure 4. A decomposition hierarchy for information and material activities in the

construction process.
The design of the overall layout of a building, for instance, is a typical aggregated activity,
consisting of a large number of sub-activities from all the above categories. In addition to the
actual primary decision-making activity resulting in the layout design, supporting activities
such as the retrieval of the city plans needed as a basis for the decision-making are needed.
Communication in the form of meetings between the different designers, sending faxes to the
client, etc. is also needed in order to achieve this task. At the end of the process the resulting
design solutions have to be distributed to other parties using plotters, copying services, the
WWW, etc.
An analogy from the material process would be the casting of concrete, which can be
considered a primary activity since its result will directly be incorporated in the final product.
The transportation of the needed materials to the site is a necessary support activity
comparable to the retrieval of information.

The introduction of IT in construction from a historical perspective

During the early decades, IT was almost exclusively used to support activities which could be
categorised as creation of new information. Analysis programs for structural analysis and
other similar applications relied on tedious manual preparation of input data (e.g. in the form
of punched cards). During the early 1980'ies the use of CAD started to proliferate, but still the
emphasis was on support for the creation (and the viewing) of data. The support for
communication was limited to several persons being able to sit by a screen and view the same
image during a design session, whereas the support for information retrieval consisted in
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several terminals being connected to the same dedicated super-mini on which the CAD
software was running. Support for making information available came in the form of very
expensive A1/A0 plotters, which enabled the plotting of drawings which emulated manually
produced drawings and were sent to copying services before the actual distribution.
This state-of-affairs is in fact the explanation for why early CAD use never achieved the huge
productivity gains that the vendors promised. The efficiency of drawing production
(especially in connection with changes) increased at best by a factor of 2-3. But real-life
designers only use a couple of hours per day doing very concentrated drawing production
work, the rest of the time is occupied with information retrieval, communication with coworkers, creative pauses, etc. In the early years there was hardly any IT support for retrieval
and communication tasks. Nowadays the situation has changed dramatically. Developments in
LAN and WAN networks, the Internet, mobile phones, video-conferencing etc. has extended
IT support to a much more comprehensive coverage of the communication and information
retrieval activities shown in figure 3. This is also reflected in the topics treated in construction
computing conference papers and journal articles.
It is interesting to note that some of the most important effects of IT on the business processes
in the industry have happened more or less in an unplanned fashion and not through conscious
re-engineering or preceded by extensive research. Consider for instance the rapid proliferation
of the telefax. How many scientific articles have been written about the effects of the telefax
on communication and business processes in construction?

The domain of ITC research

Primary topics of ITC research
Against this background, what is the domain of study of information technology in
construction? How does ITC differ from closely related disciplines such as design
methodology, construction management or facilities management? In the following some
suggestions are presented.
ITC is concerned with the information process. It is also concerned with the interfaces
between the information and material processes (techniques for data capture and automatic
control). It is, however, only indirectly interested in the material process, through the possible
effects that a more efficient information process can have on the material process. In this
respect it differs from construction management, which has a much more direct interest in the
material process.
Furthermore ITC is in particular concerned with how IT tools and techniques can be used to
facilitate and re-engineer the information process. Design methodology is also interested in
how information is created and managed but the use of IT tools to support design activities is
only a secondary issue.
ITC research is more concerned with the generic problems of how to apply new evolving IT
techniques to construction problems than with problems related to particular types of
artefacts, limited phases of the process, etc.. During the latter half of the 1980s there were for
instance numerous conference papers and articles on prototype expert systems for solving
various problems in design, construction and maintenance. The more generic results
concerning knowledge elicitation, applicability of different types of expert systems techniques
and comparisons of the results with the judgement of human experts were in this authors

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opinion in general more valuable for advancing the scientific knowledge of ITC than the
exact knowledge bases which were developed.
Similarly, it is useful to draw some kind of borderline between mainstream ITC research
and the development of computational methods for engineering analysis. Techniques such as
FEM-analysis of structures or energy simulation of buildings rely entirely on the use of
computers, but often the main problems addressed are in the correct modelling of the real
world phenomena at hand and not so much in the IT solutions. Research of this nature is
relatively well taken care of within established civil engineering sub-disciplines. Research
looking into how such analysis applications could automatically extract input parameters from
CAD-data has, on the other hand, been given some attention recently and could be seen as
mainstream ITC research.
ITC research aims at facilitating the information process in all phases of the life-cycle of
constructed facilities. In this respect, it is more general in scope than disciplines such as
design methodology and facilities management, which mainly restrict themselves to certain
life-cycle stages only.
Information transfer throughout the construction process, between organisations, life-cycle
stages and engineering disciplines is a primary research area for ITC. This means that
methods for structuring information and for data transfer have been of particular interest to
ITC researchers. Evidence of this is the attention which researchers have recently given to the
topic of computer-integrated construction, in particular to methods for describing a building
in digital form (building product modelling).

A life-cycle view of research and technology transfer

In considering the domain of ITC one should also bear in mind a life-cycle view of research
and technology transfer. The new techniques which interest researchers today may become
best practice in leading firms ten years from now and common practice in the industry twenty
years from now. This is more or less what happened to CAD-technology. The fundamental
computational methods for CAD were developed in the early 1970s, commercial minicomputer based systems were taken into use in pioneering big engineering practices in the
early 1980s, but it is only now, in the 1990s that we have reached the point where CADgenerated drawings and CAD-models are the rule rather than the exception in design practice.
This distinction between research topic, best practice and common practice is important when
comparing ITC research with research in a field such as construction management. It seems
that 90 % of ITC research has dealt with the development of techniques which are still in the
research and laboratory stage. The typical pattern is one of researchers trying out the latest
and most exciting techniques coming from general developments in computer science
(knowledge based systems, object-oriented data bases, neural networks) or from commercial
IT (currently for instance world wide web). Full scale testing of prototypes originating from
research in real construction projects has, however, been relatively rare.
The empirical study of how IT is actually used, whether in the pioneering firms representing
best practice, or in the majority representing common practice, has not been a very visible
field of research. This is in contrast with construction management, where a substantial part
of the research literature reports on case studies or broader empirical investigations.

Comparisons to IT applications in other industries

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The manufacturing industry - an often used comparison

The R&D fields which at first glance come closest to ITC are the application of information
technology to branches of the manufacturing industry. Frequently, researchers in both
construction management and construction IT have been looking for new paradigms in such
industries, in particular the car industry .
Despite many similarities, the manufacturing of cars is done in an environment which in some
important respects differs from the environment of the construction industry. In the car
industry, a few major companies have the means to develop IT systems customised to their
own needs and can impose their will on both IT vendors and subcontractors. The CAD and
CIM systems used can be very expensive due to the fact that design costs for each model are
spread widely through mass production. In the construction industry, the average company
has to be content with off-the-shelf IT solutions. The CAD budget for even a substantial
building is usually very limited. There are also severe cultural and educational barriers to the
efficient application of IT.

An alterantive field to compare with: medical informatics

An IT application domain which exhibits some interesting similarities to the construction
industry is health care, despite the fact that the end product offered by this industry seems
to have much less in common with buildings than cars have. But, on the other hand, the health
care sector seems to have an infrastructure which offers many of the same barriers to an
efficient, integrated use of IT as the construction industry. In a public sector constantly under
pressure to reduce costs and increase the quality of its service, IT is nowadays recognised as a
very strong enabler for changing the way in which patients are diagnosed and treated and the
way accumulated information is managed. Among other things this recognition has led to the
establishment of several university departments specialised in medical informatics [15].
Currently important research topics in this discipline include:
x Medical imaging. Storage, transfer and visualisation of graphical information (i.e. x-rays)
x Teleconsultation. Remote consultation of specialists for instance using video-conferencing.
x Use of the WWW for the distribution of generally available medical information.
x Expert systems for diagnosis.
x Use of virtual reality in simulation, visualisation and training applications.
x Integrated information systems for hospitals and health care regions.
The following quotes from a recent article on IT use in health care should have a familiar ring
also to researchers specialised in computer-integrated construction or building product
modelling [16]:
. Most hospitals have inherited islands of information systems from a
service which has been extremely departmentalised - and to a large extent,
remains so. Today, most hospitals have so far only been able to achieve a very
limited amount of systems integration.
The single electronic patient record is the holy grail for hospital information
technology managers - highly desirable, but highly elusive. Information on

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patients is kept in many different places, entered several times into different
systems, both clerical and computerised, often containing inconsistencies.
.The single electronic patient record would be at the heart of a hospitals data
warehouse, an integrated information system which hospital IT managers are
struggling to create.
What conclusions can be drawn from this? An obvious one is that the productivity increases
which, over the years have been achieved in the car industry through mass production, better
organisation, IT and robotization may be the wrong yardstick for setting goals for
improvements in the construction process. Maybe improvements in health care could be a
more realistic benchmark. Another conclusion is that significant lessons concerning the
cultural, legal, educational and psychological aspect of IT introduction could be learnt from a
comparative study of health care and construction.
In one respect, car manufacturing is a much better field to compare with. Cars, like buildings,
are man-made products, which need to be designed and manufactured, and thus CAD
technology is an essential part of the IT used. On the other hand, a 1996 survey by the
European commission on IT in European health-care identified 277 different applications [17],
the majority of which are still in the research & development or pilot testing phase. Most of
these are based on the use of generic IT technologies which also are of interest to ITC
researchers.

Some important topics for research

ITC research covers a large spectrum of subtopics
In a short paper of this nature, it would be impossible to provide a comprehensive survey of
the specific types of research which have been conducted under the overall label of ITC. It is
noteworthy that the spectrum of sub-topics within ITC is rather wide to the point where
researchers from different ends of the spectrum often cannot understand each others
languages (e.g. polymorphism, bench-marking).
Rather than trying to present such a broad picture or some proposed taxonomy of research
topics, the following discussion is focused on three research topics which have been, or are
currently of particular interest to ITC researchers; expert systems, product models and IT
strategies. These topics have been chosen partly because of their popularity. All three have
merited dedicated conferences of their own, special issues of scientific journals etc. They
have also been chosen because they highlight three quite different categories of ITC building
blocks: IT systems for standalone information creation tasks, standards for information
delivery and retrieval and decision-making support for the business process re-engineering
aspects of ITC. They are also different enough from each other to provide a good platform for
discussing the relationships between fundamental research, empirical research and
standardisation as well as the difference between technology-push and problem-driven
research.

Standalone IT systems - expert systems

The goal of expert systems (ES) research, to formalise the knowledge of human experts in
order to replace them by computer applications, is intellectually very challenging. This might

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