Cloud Computing Support for Construction Collaboration - Mobile and Pervasive Computing in Construction - page 243

12.3 Cloud computing as a construction collaboration
enabling technology

Construction projects are information dependent and fragmented in nature.
Typically, a construction project involves tens of participants and thousands of
documents and drawings. A successful project requires communication and
collaboration among the multiple participants, as well as sharing and management
of the vast amount of documents and drawings. IT has been used in the AEC
industry for over thirty years. The early IT application was mainly computer aided
design (CAD) and drafting. The IT application for construction collaboration
emerged after the 1994 Latham report (Latham, 1994), which emphasized the
importance of partnering and collaboration in the UK construction industry.
Collaboration technology is often used to describe various combinations of
software and/or hardware used to help people collaborate. Wilkinson (2005)
defines “(construction)collaboration technology”as “a combination of technologies
that together create a single shared interface between multiple interested individuals
(people), enabling them to participate in creative processes in which they can openly
share their collective skills, expertise, understanding and knowledge (information), and
thereby jointly deliver the best solution that meets their common goal(s)

” There is a
wide range of collaboration technologies including, but not limited to, enterprise
portals, web and video conferencing, peer-to-peer file sharing system, project
extranets,and real-time instant messaging. Among them, the Web has played an
important role as an enabler.
When the Latham report was released in 1994, Web technology was very
premature. At that time, researchers started to study the potential of the Internet
and Intranet for communication among construction project team members
(Anumba and Duke, 1997). Project websites (extranets) also evolved to overcome
the open issues in distributed teams and data resources. An extranet is typically
realized as a collaborative tool offering a secure, password-protected centralized site
accessible only by project-related personnel. It enables all members of the project,
both external and internal, to view and share information. Clients can access it at
any time of day to refresh themselves on the status of an item, to review
documentation or designs when they are able, or to keep track of when and
where key project decisions have been made and by whom. Project extranets are
analogous to cloud-based systems where all the project data are stored in a data
center on the cloud.
Traditional project extranets have been demonstrated to be a successful mech-
anism through which construction projects can be realized. However, there are key
limitations associated with extranets. Firstly, a centralized model is a single point of
failure. Should the central database fail then project information may be tempo-
rarily unavailable or at worse, lost completely. Secondly, centrally managed data
sets imply that common data models and data technologies are in place, for
example, using Oracle database solutions. In any heterogeneous construction
project, it is likely that a multitude of database technologies and data formats
(documents, spreadsheets, databases, drawings, etc.) are used by the individual

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