Divercity: a Virtual Construction Design & Briefing

15 16 DIVERCITY is a large EU funded project in the area of construction IT undertaken by a European 17 consortium of researchers and practitioners from the construction industry. It is the acronym for 18 Distributed Virtual Workspace for enhancing Communication within the Construction Industry and 19 the prototype that presents the mechanism to smoothly and collaboratively conduct the construction 20 projects from early briefing to the detailed design and even further by the end of the construction 21 phase. To be precise, DIVERCITY aims to supply a shared virtual construction design and briefing 22 environment that enables the construction industry to better undertake the client briefing and design 23 review phases of a project. 24 25 DIVERCITY comprises three main workspaces, which are client briefing, design review and 26 construction workspaces respectively. Whilst the Client Briefing workspace enables architect to 27 interact and communicate with client for capturing client needs, the design review workspace allows 28 design team to review the design solution in different respects and the construction workspace helps 29 the planner evaluate optimum buildability for a building through communication with other parties of 30 the design team. 34 Analysis, how each of them handles different aspects of a construction project in a construction supply 35 chain and how they complement each others to constitute a seamless integrated computer 36 environment for the sake of excellence of briefing and design and construction planning. 40 41 42 INTRODUCTION 43 44 The Construction industry is one of the major sectors with 780 billion Euros: it means that the construction industry 45 is the largest industry in the industrial employment in Europe with 11 million workers, which equals 7% of the 46 working population. Furthermore, owing to being dependent on the construction industry, 22 million jobs are 47 created in other sectors (Brussels, 1997). 48 49 Although many sectors such as automotive, manufacturing and services sector have very much benefited from IT for 50 better competitiveness, the construction industry have had some difficulties on the same route, which resulted in the 51 construction industry lagging behind the other sectors. The constraints that the industry have had can be outlined as 52 follows: 53 54 • The construction industry is fragmented by nature (Faraj, I., Alshawi, M. 1999). Added to this fragmentation 55 between design team and construction professionals, a high level of complexity of the work flow resulting from 56