An Ontology Applied to the Management of the Construction Process Representing an Idef0 Metamodel Integrated in a Planning/design Structure Matrix

The technological knowledge integration in construction planning tasks is complex, required a wide range of competence interrelated in an organizational frame, is time consuming, and requires intensive negotiations, and flows aiming at to achieve the design and planning performance in the construction projects. Recently there has been a wide interest on the domain ontologies from different industrial fields. Ontologies are showing to allow the development of a flexible methodology for the distributed production of knowledge, the proactive research of information, and the transparency of the knowledge structures permitting at the same time the definition of reusable knowledge objects. The ongoing research aims at modelling some basic conceptual tools for the construction management that could be usefully extended through an ontological approach. The ontological analysis allows to share general meta models and protocols that could be instantiated through the dynamic development of knowledge bases, that are required to support the planning processes and the management processes. A protocol integrating the SADT/IDEF0 formalism in an ontological model of a Design Structure Matrix is developed. The results are implemented and tested in a collaborative prototypical system for a collaborative and distributed development of construction projects.