Engineering and construction industry leaders continue to be in widespread agreement that the development of fully-integrated and automated project processes (FIAPP) is one of the highest priorities for advancing the industry in the new century. CCIS FIAPP related studies are briefly described here.
Benchmarking Use of Technology on Projects: This study quantified current levels of task automation and task-to-task integration and associated project success metrics. Sixty-eight different project-level work functions on each of over 200 projects located in more than two dozen different U.S. states were assessed and both descriptive and inferential statistics have been reported for a wide variety of data class variables. A continuing study is addressing the relationships between project success and levels of technology utilization by examining fundamental work function characteristics.
Status and Promise of Emerging Systems Interface Standards Developments: Common data structures and international IT system standard protocols are currently being developed to enable the development of compatible, modular, cost-competitive software that will serve a wide variety of project business functions. Eleven such emerging systems interface standards have been systematically characterized and assessed for their potential application and benefit to industry. Breadth of system scope, the progress attained thus far, and opportunities for interfaces with other standards suggest that three of the eleven standards will offer the most benefit to the industry.
IT Integration Strings for Planning and Design of Infrastructure Projects: Lack of systems integration continues to be a key source of inefficiency in the delivery of capital facilities. Three studies have focused on identification of high-priority IT system integration gaps associated with the planning and design of water, power, and communications transmission projects. These studies have demonstrated the application of an innovative, rigorous, yet efficient methodology for such a determination.
Beyond these FIAPP studies and participation on CII’s Breakthrough Strategy Committee, CCIS researchers have also focused much effort on the development of automation-enabling technologies. Specifically, CCIS researchers have been actively involved in the development of: 1) advanced control systems for construction equipment, 2) rapid local area modeling techniques using sparse 3D range point clouds, and 3) ubiquitously deployed sensing systems and sensor data fusion and integration methods.
Executing Capital Projects with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Systems: While ERP systems can serve as the foundation for one of three strategic approaches for achieving higher levels of business function integration, the approach has presented many new challenges and disappointments to implementing organizations. A functional gap analysis indicated that one prevalent ERP system inadequately addresses 43% of 54 critical project delivery functions.
Future Plans for CCIS Technology Thrust
The implications of the Tier-Two Workforce approach on needed field technologies will be examined and development priorities will be established. In addition, technologies that support facility security-related assessments and enhancements will be examined. Dependent on outside funding, some technology-related activities in will be continuations of work in project sensing systems development (e.g., automated hazard avoidance with rapid local area modeling). Technical issues pertaining to indoor air quality (particularly how they relate to facility security) will also likely be examined.
