Rethinking IT for Rethinking Construction

摘要

Rethinking Construction is co-ordinating all industry activities to create collaborative ways of working. This collaborative way of working aims to create the best value for the client and user by eliminating waste, involving various parties in construction to co-operate early in the design and construction process and to supply chain management to work in partnership. In this way, profit for individual companies would be enhanced and overall cost to client reduced. A new way of thinking in the UK is being promulgated by reports from Latham and Egan and the organisation "Rethinking Construction" is supported with UK government funds. The paper addresses the trend in the UK construction industry towards a collaborative approach to design and construction within the framework of "Rethinking Construction" and proposes how IT, particularly evolutionary search and optimisations tools, can be useful in achieving this goal. The paper concludes that adaptive search and optimisation, visualisation and negotiation tools have progressed enough to offer a collaborative environment, which allows every member of the project team to explore the regions of high performance which satisfy their individual requirements, and to achieve a mutually inclusive negotiated final solution. Rethinking Construction and the future role of IT to support it, discussed in this paper, is a UK lead European issue which promotes a collaborative way of working in the construction industry.