Computer-integrated collaborative design and operation in the construction industry

The construction industry is emerging as the next frontier for computer-integrated technologies, just as the manufacturing industry did 25 years ago. More recently, the emergence of Internet-Intranet technologies is creating new mechanisms for collaborative design and operation that were previously impossible. The advances that have occurred in the manufacturing industry in the areas of collaborative design, intelligent process planning and computer-integrated manufacturing provide significant insights for formulating analogous paradigms for computer-integrated construction. However, in many aspects, the development of enabling technologies (for design, operation and decision-making) to achieve this transformation in the construction industry is not as trivial as repackaging existing technologies and tools that have been developed for the manufacturing industry. In this paper, we draw attention to some of the significant research opportunities and challenges that exist in these areas of collaborative design and computer-integrated construction, and outline some related researches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.