It support for construction planning: A system design based on integrated information

The aim of the work has been to develop a conceptual design of an IT system for construction planning. For the development, an iterative method has been used, based on prototypes developed in dialogue with industry professionals. The results are presented in four papers describing the various development stages of the system design: the main approach with its corresponding demonstrator, the description of an implemented system, the evaluation of the system in a field trial and last, a prototype enhancing the functionality of the implemented system. Finally, a synthesis is presented and discussed. This thesis demonstrates a possible integration of product and construction information together with the main functions needed to support incremental construction planning. A central task of construction planning has been defined as the configuration of a construction process that will convert a designed building into a real building. Consequently, the main areas a supporting system needs to deal with are the designed product, the production assignments and realisation of the production tasks including connections between products, activities and resources. Based on this, a conceptual schema covering these areas has been defined. The main approach here is the integration between the two central objects of planning -products and activities - thus including the notion of 'result' in activities, alongside time, resources and costs. For this, an object-oriented representation of the building design was used, aligning this research into the overall development and use of product models. Construction planning is usually carried out top down and step by step. Thus, the system functions proposed allow the users to plan the production process incrementally, taking into account previously generated restrictions while making use of professional knowledge and earlier cases. The main approach is to operationalise the notion of 'construction knowledge' in the form of templates for task structures, product decomposition and production methods. Combined with individual views for allowed, planned and achieved results, the use of templates aims at providing an efficient planning environment.