An Integrated Telepresence Environment for Collaboration in Construction

For construction projects involving transient ‘virtual organisations’ composed of non-collocated team-members, the adoption of concurrent engineering principles is seen as vital. An important aspect of concurrent engineering in construction is the need for an effective communications infrastructure between team members. Traditionally, such communication has been handled through person-to-person meetings, however the complexity of construction projects has grown and, as a result, reliance on new information and communications technologies is becoming increasingly necessary. Hence, within a concurrent engineering setting, there is the need for an integrated information and collaboration environment that will create a persistent space to support interaction between project personnel throughout all phases of construction projects. This joint initiative between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Loughborough University, British Telecommunications plc. (BT) and Kajima Corporation explores computer-supported mechanisms for enhancing distributed engineering collaboration. The goal of this paper is to develop a set of requirements, a system architecture and a system prototype to facilitate computer-supported collaboration among distributed teams. The prototype consists of a comprehensive working collaborative system built from the integration of complementary standalone applications. These applications are the CAIRO system, developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Telepresence system developed by Loughborough University and BT.