Cloud computing to enhance collaboration, coordination and communication in the construction industry

Abstract

Construction industry involves a multitude of stakeholders who perform their work from disparate locations. This involvement of numerous stakeholders, which is common in construction industry compared to the other industries, has led to conceptual fragmentation. In spite of this fragmentation, the construction industry delivers complex projects with limitations. The limitations can be mostly attributed to the difficulties in achieving the optimum levels of collaboration, coordination, and communication (referred as three C's) which are required for efficient project delivery.Shifting from a two-dimensional design documentation, the industry has recently embraced Building Information Models (BIM) that allow an information rich visualization of the facility during feasibility analysis stage enabling efficient information transfer among the stakeholders. Deploying the BIM in the 'cloud' can further enhance the project integration through the near optimal levels of the three C's. Very few researchers have investigated that the modifications made to the BIM can promote post project delivery functions too in a seamless fashion.To incorporate this, the authors had proposed a conceptual framework using BIM on the cloud for construction project life cycle. This framework is described in this paper. The utility of the framework is also discussed.

Big Data in the construction industry: A review of present status, opportunities, and future trends

“…Amarnath et al [161] deployed Revit Server on the cloud for 58 collaboration and coordination of architectural and structural 59 models. Rawai et al [162] Cloud computing has already accelerated the uptake of IT 77 in the construction industry by transforming many domain 78 specific applications as discussed above.…”

BIM-Enabled Design Collaboration Processes in Remote Architectural Practice and Education in Australia

“…The open-ended interview provided a systematic method for collecting participants' ideas, information, and opinions (Monroe 2002). Eleven semi-structured questions were developed from past literature (Amarnath et al 2011;Gu and London 2010;Liu et al 2017), focusing on: (1) BIM adoption and design process, (2) design and information management, and (3) technical and nontechnical issues (see the Supplementary Material). At the end of their interviews, all participants were given an opportunity to make any additional comments on BIM use in practice and education.…”

“…In addition, a "big and open" BIM should store all project and operational information in a way which is streamed for mobile devices and enables direct communication between the model and functional systems that are used by stakeholders as well as the public (Poljanšek 2017). Thus, as identified through the interviews in this paper, successful BIM adoption and implementation should consider the three Cs of BIM: communication, coordination, and collaboration, as well as cloud computing (Amarnath et al 2011), highlighting new real-time remote interaction and mobile communication in design practice. Compared with past research on remote BIM collaboration, largely dealing with AR, VR, or MR (Alizadehsalehi et al 2020;Chen et al 2019;El Ammari and Hammad 2019), participants in this study were working from home and used videoconferencing tools for remote communication and BIM360 for design collaboration and coordination.…”

Towards an Intelligent Platform for Big 3d Geospatial Data Management

“…caused by the integration of building sensor data that lead to additional data represented as point clouds. Multiple frameworks such as the SOA4BIM® framework (Jardim-Goncalves et al, 2010), the conceptual framework proposed by Amarnath et al (2011), the BIM visual system developed by Chuang et al (2011), and the framework proposed by Wu et al (2012) were developed for the storage and management of 3D BIM data in general.…”