This perception of the system, in its extended architecture, is directly in line with the activities in action at European level about the Working Group 2 (WG2): Digitizing European initiative, Strengthening Leadership in digital technologies and in digital industrial platforms across Value Chains in all sectors of the Economy. The report of the WG2 presented in February declared the focus of the initiative pointing on the development of “digital industrial platform”. However, in this report, the constructions were not covered. Thanks to an Italian amendment highlighting the needs of inclusive platforms and supports for the digitisation for the construction sector, it is now included as a vertical focus.
CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORKS
The research project presented in this paper rise from the experiences gained during two years of activities spent helping construction companies and professionals in the digital transition with specific reference to the introduction of BIM processes in their organisations. This study highlighted a huge gap between the competencies required for the effective introduction of digital processes and the mean competencies of the organisations in the construction sector. However, the increasing requirements derived both from standards and costumers and from the general need of more productivity of the sector, are pushing the rod ever higher. This paper presented the general framework referred to the development of an integrated system devoted to promote the collaboration between multiple actors moving the focus from files and isolated data environment to data and distributed data sources. The structure of the proposed system is based on the principles included in the Italian standard UNI 11337:2017 \cite{UNI_2017,UNI_2017a,UNI_2017ba} where the general idea is provided but are missing the applicative directions that are studied in this research. We presented the path followed during the development of the research project focusing on the high-level structure of the proposed system. In particular, we have defined the steps following listed:
- Deconstruct environment in a single-model case.
- Integrated system divided into two levels, namely the CDE of sharing and the Digital Collaboration Platform in a single-project environment.
- An integrated system in a multi-project environment.
- Extension of the system on a multi-country structure (European Level)
Furthermore, due to the interdisciplinary character of the research that includes both the process infrastructure and the possible application of data, the followed path has led to the production of different studies. Some examples are, the application of hedonic price method in the evaluation of building value based on BIM and GIS processes \citep{Pavan_Mirarchi_2016}, the perspective on the use of data for design support \citep{Pavan_Antisari_Mirarchi_Rizzarda_2017} and possible instruments devoted to improve the capability of data transfer between different software (will be presented at the LC3 Conference in Heraklion, Greece). The research is now focused on the definition of the different elements described in the process as the “layer of deconstruction” and of the “privacy layer”. In particular, we are working on the definition of the rules that have to be included in the two environments and in the two layers of interface.
Note
1 Intended here as geometric models created and enriched in its informative content using BIM Authoring tools.
2 The software is intended as the instrument able to explore the model file in its native form without any change on the model itself.
3 This implies that there are not changes in the model. These changes can be introduced during translation processes (for example from the native form to the IFC format) that are used improperly.
4 The platform is de facto unique, but at the first level the different environments are isolated to each other and the access is regulated. Thus, each environment is at the first level an independent silo where can be established different rules according to the specific needs of each project.
5 In this context the model is intended in a wider vision including the entire project model constituted by the geometrical model and all the information directly related to it also using external databases (In this vision, the entire CDE is the model itself). The deconstruction activity referred to a single model have to be extended to each model.