The Virtual Design Team (VDT) extends and operationalizes Galbraith's (1973) information-processing view of organizations. VDT simulates the micro-level information processing, communication, and coordination behavior of participants in a project organization and predicts several measures of participant and project-level performance. VDT-1 (Cohen 1991) and VDT-2 (Christiansen 1993) modeled project organizations containing actors with perfectly congruent goals engaged in complex but routine engineering design work within static organization structures. VDT-3 extends the VDT-2 work process representation to include measures of activity flexibility, complexity, uncertainty, and interdependence strength. It explicitly models the effects of goal incongruency between agents on their information processing and communication behavior while executing more flexible tasks. These extensions allow VDT to model more flexible organizations executing less routine work processes. VDT thus bridges rigorously between cognitive and social psychological micro-organization theory and sociological and economic macro-organization theory for project teams. VDT-3 has been used to model and simulate the design of two major subsystems of a complex satellite launch vehicle. This case study provides initial evidence that the micro-contingency theory embodied in VDT-3 can be used to predict organizational breakdowns, and to evaluate alternative organizational changes to mitigate identified risks. VDT thus supports true "organizational engineering" for project teams.agency theory, concurrent engineering, coordination theory, contingency theory, goal incongruency, interdependence, project management, project organizations, computational organizational design, information processing, new product development, organization design, professionals, semiroutine tasks

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To provide a safe and productive environment, project managers need to plan for the work spaces required by construction activities. Work space planning involves representing various types of spaces required by construction activities in three dimensions and across time. Since a construction schedule consists of hundreds of activities requiring multiple types of spaces, it is practically impossible to expect project managers to specify manually the spatio-temporal data necessary to represent work spaces in four dimension. This paper presents mechanisms that automatically generate project-specific work spaces from a generic work space ontology and a project-specific IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) based 4D production model. The generation of these work spaces leads to a space-loaded production model. Work spaces know to which activities and construction methods they belong, when, where and for how long they exist and how much volume they occupy. A space-loaded production model enables richer 4D CAD simulations, time-space conflict analysis and proactive work space planning prior to construction.

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Construction activities require a set of work spaces to be executed safely and productively. The locations and volumes of these spaces change in three dimensions and across time, according to project-specific design and schedule information. Previous research on construction space management requires users to specify the spatio-temporal data necessary to represent each project-specific space needed for construction. Since a construction schedule consists of hundreds of activities requiring multiple types of spaces, this approach is practically infeasible. There is a need for a generic (projectindependent) representation of work spaces, from which the project-specific instances of spaces can be derived automatically based on project-specific design and construction schedule information. This paper formalizes such a generic space description as a computer-interpretable ontology. This ontology is general, reusable and comprehensive. It enables a prototype system that captures the spatial requirements associated with construction methods and automates the generation of project-specific spaces represented in three dimensions and across time.

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payers, many private and public organizations now reengineer their organizations ro improve tiieir products or services and ro reduce time between receipt of a new order and delivery of a requested product or service to a satisfied customer. When managers change existing work processes to reduce schedules dramatically, interdependent activities that were previously performed sequentially must then be performed concurrently. Organization theory predicts that coordination ot concurrent interdependent activities is significantly more difficult and costly than coordination of the same activities performed sequentially. Yet traditional organization theory can predict neither the magnitude nor the specific actors and activities that require incremental coordination, even though coordination load and rework can grow exponentially as there is greater concurrency of complex, interdependent activities performed in parallel.In contrast with today's empirical approach to the Virtual Design Team (VDT) project is that mandeveloping organizations, engineers have long agers should design organizations the same way engidesigned artifacts such as bridges and airplanes using neers design bridges: by building and analyzing computational models. The engineer models a design computational models of planned organizations and in the computer, analyzes it, changes it, and only after the processes that they support. the design is well understood is it finalized and Our approach in the VDT project [6] is to extend released for construction or manufacture. The vision of organization theory so it considers individual organi- 84November 1998/Vol. 41. NQ II COMHUNICATIONS OF T>1E ACM

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