Delft University of Technology
Faculty Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering Transport Technology
A. van Randen Produktmodelleren in de bouw.
Literature survey, Report 95.3.LT.4433, Transport Engineering and Logistics.
Designing and building a house is a very complex process in which many participants are involved. The client, the architect, the contractor and the subcontractors and the gouvemment with a set of building regulations. The communication between the different participants is crucial for the success of the proces. When participants agree on the format in wich the information will be described it is possible to exchage information, to centralize the information and to build a library. It will also be possible to develop computer aided conformance checking.
The Stichting Bouw Research (SBR) published a report on the manners of product modelling. It describes the ways to generate a product model for each discipline in the proces in wich the information for that particular discipline is kept. By using different viewmodels it is possible to look at the information in different manners. The different applications, used within the discipline, all have their demand for specific information which can be deduced from the central product model. Optimising the logistic process becomes much easier as we have access to all information needed.
To improve the communication between the different participants, work has been done to create a product model above the different disciplines. In the SBR research this is realized by using the overlap of information in the lower models for the highest model. A different approach is the one used in the Combine project where all the information conceming the building is kept in a integrated data model. Every participant has acces to the data by using different design toois.
To describe information in a model a structure is needed. The International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) has developed a STandard for the Exchange of Product model data (STEP). In the RATAS projekt in Finland there has been an experiment implementing this data structure. In this projekt the building is described in different levels of detail: building, system, subsystem, part and detail. In the Technical University of Delft research has been done to describe product information in a generic way wich enables us to use parts of the same information in different designs.
Before trying to optimize the communication it could also be useful to investigate if the need for communication can decrease. By a better separation of the different disciplines and by dividing the responsabilities many of the dependencies between the disciplines will disappear. A practical implementation of this concept is the Matura Nederland system in wich the infill system is separated from the support system. By doing so the need for communication between the two fieids is decreased enormously. In the Matura concept the different disciplines involved in the infill system are combined in one product; the total infill system of a house.
Reports on Transport Engineering and Logistics (in Dutch)
