Process Modelling, Process Management and Collaboration

GUEST EDITOR(S):

Dr. Peter Katranuschkov, Senior Research Scientist
Institute of Construction Informatics, TU Dresden, Germany
email: Peter.Katranuschkov@cib.bau.tu-dresden.de

SUMMARY: In the last decade, there have been much research and development efforts in construction IT spent on various collaboration related issues such as product modelling and management, data exchange and sharing, knowledge management, Web-enabled cooperative work. The focus of these developments has been on the efficient use of project information (architectural and engineering solutions, drawings, specifications, reports), created in result of various kinds of project activities. Less attention has been paid to the processes themselves in which this information is being created. However, to add more value to collaboration, decrease the amount of wasted time and increase the quality of the communicated information, it is necessary to consider simultaneously various process modelling and management issues in tight relationship with collaboration demands. The nine papers appearing in this Special Issue of the ITcon journal address many essential process related topics. Developed on the basis of selected contributions from the CIB-W78 Conference on Construction IT held at Dresden, Germany in July 2005, they cover aspects of collaborative business process networks, agent-enabled process models used in cooperative civil engineering work, prediction/simulation processes for interdisciplinary decision support, formal specification of construction schedules, visualization support to process coordination and, last but not least, a case study examining the usefulness of several coordination support techniques put together. This broad range of aspects does have a binding idea that can be tracked throughout all papers – the process-centric approach to project collaboration. In different and distinguished ways, the work done by all authors substantially contributes to that essential upcoming issue of construction IT.