A session-based collaboration environment for BIM-based Project Life-cycle Management

It has been recognized that a system that facilitates efficient communication and interaction is critical in order to improve coordination between AEC project participants. Various research literatures show that migration of conventional AEC work processes, which have relied heavily on two-dimensional drawings, to more convergent processes that share a single common information source based on three-dimensional object-oriented data or BIM, can yield better outcomes and improve productivity. However, several problems made it very difficult to collaborate and share information between project participants. Some of the problems include legal liability issues, a reluctance to share inside information with others, maintenance of a master model, a dynamically changing organizational structure of a project group, and a collaboration-support system that can support these issues, etc. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to propose a conceptual scheme of a "session-based" collaboration environment, called Construction Project Life Cycle Management (CPLM). CPLM is a system intended to help project participants make better decisions and to facilitate coordination between various stakeholders in a project by providing virtual collaboration groups called "sessions" and methodology to support the open information policy between both horizontal and vertical organizations within those sessions. Additionally, this paper introduces a system to be developed using the proposed conceptual scheme of a session-based CPLM and its development plan.