In England, during the last decade, several initiatives such as, the Movement for Innovation (M4I), the Government Construction Clients Panel (GCCP) and the Construction Round Table (CRT) were supported by umbrella organisations. The Latham Report [1] suggested that productivity gains of 30% could be achieved from the development and uptake of data integration across the building and construction industry. Other authors estimate that during the life of a project i) 20% of design and construction costs are due to waste ii) 80% of construction administration processes could be saved with single-entry, web-enabled and shared databases.

Nowadays, major indicators show that in several organizations more than 50% of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) budget is spent in integration and there is an expectation of more than 20 billions of Euro spent by 2006 for applications integration [2].

The overall success target for Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry is to reach a greater and more effective integration of information and communication throughout all levels of the industry and through the whole life cycle of the project. Electronic data integration allows all partners to share a common set of project information and to be uptake at the same time. Information sharing avoids duplication of data entry, allows value adding to project data as well as integration with web based technologies in order to enable virtual projects in real time. In Singapore, building authorities are investing in speeding-up buildings plan approval by automatic plan checking through a dedicated web service [3]. From April 2001, the Japanese Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transportation started to specify contractors as digital documents and expect that all public works sector will start electronic deliverable by 2010 [3].

For real productivity gains to be achieved, concentration on the elimination of resources wastage by eliminating manual integration activities and improving the efficiency of value adding activities has to be done. This means that the focus has to be on the need to manage the interface between the different project applications as well as the need to improve information flow through integration of electronic data exchange. In order to fully integrated data the use of standardized data format, independent of software vendors, is required.

In this paper a multi-level platform to enhance interoperability in AEC industry is proposed in order to overtake the identified problems. The proposed platform is not specific for the AEC sector it can also be applied to several other manufacturing industries where integration of cooperative production and distributed design are still needed.

1

Latham, M., Constructing the Team, The Stationery Office, London, UK, 1994.

2

IDEAS [Online] Available: http://www.ideas-roadmap.net/, February 2004.

3

Liebich, T. et al., Speeding-up the building plan approval - the Singapore e-plan checking project offers automatic plan checking based on IFC, Turk, Z. and Scherer, R., eWork and eBusiness in AEC, ECPPM 2002.

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