Collaborative planning of AEC projects and partnerships

This paper discusses the development of novel methods and a platform for the support of project planning processes in Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC). Through the new approach it will be possible to systematically generate comprehensive project plans by cultivating and enacting the logic and intelligence of incremental and collaborative planning strategies. The underlying methodology treats project planning as the execution of a series of structured dialogues between prospective project partners. In the paper, the selection and preparation of a Design-Build partnership is used as an example implementation. It discusses the methodology and shows how workflow definition and enactment can be realized through the prototype platform developed in the European e-HUBs research project. The paper focuses on the first stage of the research and discusses future evaluation by domain experts to validate the approach. (C) 2005 Published by Elsevier B.V.