INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY FOR CONSTRUCTION: RECENT WORK AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS

摘要

Advancing the application of information technology in construction is a major international research and innovation endeavour of concern to scientific establishments and industry. A significant focal point for this research, in terms of its dissemination and the derivation of a shared research agenda, has been the working commission concerned with IT for construction within the International Council for Innovation and Research in Construction (CIB). Working commission 78 of CIB has been active for about 20 years in holding annual meetings of leading scholars in the field. These annual meetings have allowed the principal research activities from around the world to be presented to expert fora and documented in a series of annual proceedings. More recently, some of the more complete research projects have been reported in an on-line electronic journal published in association with the working commission. The meetings have typically allowed debates and discussion to take place regarding the state of progress with key research themes, the emergence of new research themes, and a vision of construction activities in the future to which ongoing research could relate. This paper seeks to capture some of the overall experiences from the activities of this working commission by reviewing the key research issues that have been addressed in recently reported work and seeking to elicit a vision of future IT-enabled construction projects that might inform future research. It reports on an overview of the scope, current approaches and future research agenda that has arisen from consideration of the papers presented, and discussion that took place, at its most recent meetings in South Africa in 2001 and Denmark in 2002.