A PROJECT REQUIREMENTS DEFINITION TOOL FOR THE AEC INDUSTRY

摘要

Delivering facilities and civil infrastructure systems involves a staggering number of players. Often with limited local knowledge, Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) professionals must produce one-of-a-kind products with stringent cost, schedule, and quality standards. Additionally, construction projects involve the integration of many technical sub-systems and components in a context that often involves complex and sensitive economic, social, political, and environmental decisions. This form of organization is typified by a management and decision-making climate in which problems are highly interdependent while the people, methods and organizations involved are extraordinarily independent. Currently, the flow of information from early debates and strategic project definition through design, engineering, procurement, construction, operation and decommissioning is practically non-existent. Furthermore, clients and AEC professionals often have sharply different expectations regarding the contents of a project definition package, or brief. The importance of well-defined statements of user requirements is obvious but often is not adequately addressed. This paper describes BriefMaker~(TM), a web-based tool being developed with support from the U.S. National Science Foundation. This tool empowers businesses to develop on-line user needs and analysis statements according to their preferences, within a scalable, distributed, and heterogeneous environment, that provides system users with access to templates and knowledge bases to help them create preliminary models of the type of constructed project desired. With superior understanding of clients' needs, designers can shorten the product delivery cycle and provide an end product with greater customer satisfaction.