Integrating product and process information in the construction sector

Collaborative working in construction projects is becoming very important as many activities are usually performed involving actors based in different geographical locations. Recent years have seen the emergence and development of a plethora of visual software modelling tools, modelling standards, methods for wide enterprise concurrent engineering, and techniques for exchanging and sharing construction information between software applications. This paper describes an integrated product and process information modelling system developed to manage information essential to construction managers. The integrated conceptual model is based on information and functional requirements and was developed to model both product and process information in a hierarchical manner. The also shows how the model relates to practice, and presents the benefits that are gained from structuring information using this approach.