Industrialised, Integrated, Intelligent sustainable Construction - I3con

HANDBOOK 2 SUSTAINABLE CONSTRUCTION
Other industry reports, such as (Aranda et al. 2008b; Maher 2008; Succar 2009), have argued that
entity-based CAD applications do lack the frameworks for facilitating simultaneous collaboration, and
the integration of robust information into project databases. These CAD applications also feature
primitive elements such as lines and splines instead of object-oriented (o-o) models, and other
shortcomings that often become Achilles heels to the development processes and performance of
construction infrastructures. Ankrah and Proverbs (2005) argued that performance of construction
infrastructures depends largely on stakeholders’ will and commitment to adopt best practices through
thorough integration, value sharing, collaboration, effective communication and ease of manipulating
designs in complex spatio-temporal dimensions.
Many of the major limitations in entity-based CAD often render designs vulnerable to inordinate
errors, conflict of interest and fragmentation of information between stakeholders in design,
procurement and facilities management processes. Some authors have also reported that these
limitations support conventional fragmented processes, against collaboration which has been
established as a vitally important component of integrated system. According to (Kalay 2001),
collaboration is not limited to superficial or semi-structured co-ordination of project teams, rather it
involves uniformity in the nature of data being created and transmitted in integrated system, and
compliance with structured mechanisms for servicing the entire digital systems under which they
operate. While investigating the drivers of effective collaboration in virtual teams, (Nikas et al. 2007;
Rezgui 2007) argued that partial adoption of integrated technologies and wanton compromise of the
ethos of collaboration could spur tragic outcomes on project expectations. The nature of these
outcomes and the potential impact of total or partial breakdown in collaboration have not received
adequate attention in existing literatures.
Moreover, (Han et al. 2007) also identified the industry’s reluctance to adopt BIM, the limitations of
entity-based CAD and allied applications being used; and the compatibility of these applications with
integrated systems as some of the impediments to effective collaboration in virtual teams. There are
three possibilities in collaboration, and they shall be used in later discussions as follows:
1. Perfect cooperation between parties to engage all the ethos of collaboration in BIM environment.
This scenario will be referred to as perfect collaboration.
2. Partial cooperation between parties to engage the ethos of collaboration i.e. few component
players of integrated systems may have all the requisite facilities and engage in BIM deployment
while others do not have the framework to drive the system. The phenomenon shall be referred to
as partial collaboration.
3. Outright lack of cooperation by stakeholders to collaborate. This scenario shall be referred to as
null cooperation in the later part of this study. This concept shall be addressed as non
collaboration.
Some other studies have demonstrated the potential of BIM in facilitating digital integrated systems
that can overcome the limitations of entity-based CAD systems, and provide reliable platforms for
facilitating enduring performance of construction projects in their entire lifecycles (Moses et al. 2008;
Nakamura et al. 2006). However, BIM is an end in itself; it does not guarantee automatic results when
deployed on every project until its functional drivers are activated appropriately. Meeting these
requirements to service the performance of virtual environments has been a major challenge in BIM
adoption. These requirements include appropriate skills (Sher et al. 2009) and compliant software
applications (Tse et al. 2005) as well as the enduring spirit of collaboration (Aranda et al. 2008b). The
goal of this chapter therefore is to elicit perfect collaboration as an important driver of success in the
BIM environment. There are three main sections in this study: the first section reviews collaboration
platforms in BIM, the second section exemplifies the applications of game theory in virtual
environments, and lastly; the third section discusses possible outcomes of collaboration in specific
scenarios through gaming lenses.
95