Designing and Evaluating Visualization Techniques for Construction Planning

Construction project teams view project information with traditional paper-based methods that have remained largely unchanged with the advent of computers and electronic project information. Observations of project teams show that these methods fail to support critical group decision-making tasks because they do not communicate relationships between project information. There is an opportunity to design and evaluate the use of visualization techniques to visually communicate relationships between project information. This paper discusses our research efforts to prototype and evaluate two visualization techniques highlight and overlay that visually relate project information. Introduction Today, AEC professionals produce project information in electronic form with discipline-specific tools. Much research has focused on developing methods to integrate this information and standardize how AEC data and their relationships are modeled [IAI 1998]. Large scale displays to view these information models are becoming economical. However, no tools provide functionality to visually communicate the relationships between project information. Consequently teams must spend a lot of time mentally relating project information to support decisionmaking tasks [Fischer et al. 2000]. Visualization techniques that visually communicate the relationships between project information can potentially improve a team's ability to relate project information and improve the overall decision-making process. Consider the following hypothetical scenario in which a project team uses a CIW with two visualization techniques -highlight and overlay to review a project