INTERACTIVE COORDINATION OF DISTRIBUTED WORK PLANS

摘要

Planning during construction is a continuous and complex process that involves many participants because needed information is usually not found within one party but is spread out among parties. It truly is a distributed process. Nevertheless, few existing planning tools provide means to facilitate this process. This paper describes a representation of weekly work plans that makes it possible for plans to be merged so as to allow for meaningful determination of compatibility. Issues related to the foremen and general contractors' involvement in suggesting alternatives and changes to work plans are discussed. The distributed, bottom-up approach to planning as advocated here radically differs from practices supported by existing computing tools. It is made possible to a large extent thanks to the widespread availability of low-cost computers and network communications. We are currently working with specialty contractors to identify the possibilities provided by the interactive coordination of distributed work plans in order to better coordinate work.