6.3 Suspended Ceiling Design Process - Bilkent University

the GDCPP. From the point of view of decision making during the
process, there are so-called soft gates and hard gates. Soft gates imply
that decisions may be approved conditionally afterwards. On the other
hand, hard gates indicate final and firm decision points whether or not to
proceed to the next phase of the process. This is because late design
changes often cause substantial additional costs in construction
projects (Wu et al., 1998). All GDCPP process maps are publicized at a
Web site hosted by the University of Salford (University of Salford,
2003).
Figure 3.2: A View from GDCPP Process Map (University of Salford,
2003)
Recently, the GDCPP ─in combination with Unified Modeling Language
(UML) diagramming─ has constituted the base of process modeling
approach proposed in EU ICCI cluster project IST-2001-33022 (Wix and
Katranuschkov, 2002).
Although these generic models provide a good overview of the design
process, they are often too abstract to be utilized in practice. Thus, they
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