CIFECENTER FOR INTEGRATED FACILITY ENGINEERING Engineering Test Cases to Motivate the Formalization of an AEC Project Model as a Directed Acyclic Graph of Views and Dependencies

This paper presents industry test cases that illustrate the multi-disciplinary, constructive, iterative, and unique character of AEC projects. These test cases show that, to perform their tasks on these projects, AEC engineers construct task-specific engineering views from information in other engineering views. These engineers have difficulty constructing and integrating task-specific views on these projects today. Based on these observations, this paper proposes that engineers could benefit from an approach that provides them with simple, formal methods to iteratively construct a task-specific view from other views as needed, and control the integration of these views as the project progresses. In this way, an integrated project model emerges as a directed acyclic graph of task-specific views and dependencies. This paper defines requirements for such an approach, and discusses current project modeling approaches in terms of these requirements. While points of departure, existing approaches do not explicitly enable engineers to easily construct and integrate task-specific views and control a project model in a way that maps closely to the way AEC projects work today. To address these requirements, this paper introduces the conceptually simple Perspective Approach that enables engineers from multiple disciplines to formalize the dependency of a view on other views, and to control an evolving project model of these views and their dependencies.