Formalization of transactions in AEC/FM industries

• Main Author: Pouria, Arezou
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2011
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/32233

The main objective of this dissertation is to contribute to the field of Computer Integrated Construction (CIC). Total Project Systems (TOPS) is an ongoing research project at the University of British Columbia which streamlines the CIC strategies. This research is a component of the TOPS project which focuses on the formalization of transactions or information exchanges in AEC/FM. The main objective of this research is achieved by pursuing sub-objectives set as follows: • Trace the trend of CIC in the AEC/FM industry and study the related efforts within other industries. • Develop an approach for formalizing transactions. • Analyze a process as an example and define formalized transactions needed for the process. • Create a prototype system that uses the formalized transactions to demonstrate and evaluate the proposed approach. The research consists of two parts. It uses techniques such as a survey, literature review, and a case study, to answer the questions of the first part of the research: • What is the state of the art in the field of formalization of transactions in AEC/FM? • How should AEC/FM transactions be formalized? Answering these questions led us to propose a multidimensional formalization approach that uses eXtensible Mark up Language (XML). The second part of the research demonstrates that the proposed approach formalizes transactions in the way that research suggested in the first part.. For this part, the research develops a prototype application for the example process, which uses the proposed multidimensional formalization system. The example process was taken from a case study done at UBC TREK program centre. The research implements a rapid prototype testing technique to evaluate the functionality of the proposed system for the prototype application. The main contributions of the research are answering the questions in the first part, and the proposed system and its implementation in the second part. Future directions of the research could be to improve the proposed approach, and developing other applications that use the formalized transactions. === Applied Science, Faculty of === Civil Engineering, Department of === Graduate