Coordinating Loosely-Coupled Work in Construction Inspection Activities

Inspections represent key activities in construction projects. They allow coordinating the work of the main contractor and the subcontracted companies participating in the project. Today the inspection activities and the coordination process are done using information recorded into paper-based blueprints. As a consequence of it, coordinating the activities derived from inspection processes become expensive, slow and error-prone. This paper presents a mobile shared workspace, named COIN (Construction Inspector), which helps the participants in a construction project to overcome these limitations. COIN was particularly designed to be used on tablet PCs, but it is able to run on several computing devices. This workspace has been tested in a controlled work scenario. The preliminary results are highly positive, indicating this proposal could have an important impact on the construction management process.

[1]  Christian F. Tschudin,et al.  Embedding MANETs in the Real World , 2003, PWC.

[2]  Luís A. Castro,et al.  Activity Recognition for Context-aware Hospital Applications: Issues and Opportunities for the Deployment of Pervasive Networks , 2007, Mob. Networks Appl..

[3]  Matti Vartiainen,et al.  Mobile Virtual Work - A New Paradigm? , 2005 .

[4]  Armin B. Cremers,et al.  The Use of Cooperation Scenarios in the Design and Evaluation of a CSCW System , 1998, IEEE Trans. Software Eng..

[5]  Carl Gutwin,et al.  A Groupware Design Framework for Loosely Coupled Workgroups , 2005, ECSCW.

[6]  Max Mühlhäuser,et al.  iClouds - Peer-to-Peer Information Sharing in Mobile Environments , 2003, Euro-Par.

[7]  Carl Gutwin,et al.  A Descriptive Framework of Workspace Awareness for Real-Time Groupware , 2002, Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW).

[8]  John M. Kamara,et al.  Using mobile computing for construction site information management , 2008 .

[9]  Feniosky Peña-Mora,et al.  Robust Mobile Ad Hoc Space for Collaboration to Support Disaster Relief Efforts Involving Critical Physical Infrastructure , 2006 .

[10]  Wolfgang Prinz,et al.  The future workspace : mobile and collaborative working perspectives , 2006 .

[11]  Marcela D. Rodríguez,et al.  Context-Aware Mobile Communication in Hospitals , 2003, Computer.

[12]  Danijel Rebolj,et al.  Mobile computing in construction (Editorial) , 2004, J. Inf. Technol. Constr..

[13]  Jesús Favela,et al.  Opportunistic Interaction in P2P Ubiquitous Environments , 2004, CRIWG.

[14]  Yan Wang,et al.  Designing mobile solutions for mobile workers: lessons learned from a case study , 2005, ICEC '05.

[15]  José A. Pino,et al.  Designing Mobile Shared Workspaces for Loosely Coupled Workgroups , 2007, CRIWG.

[16]  Danijel Rebolj,et al.  Mobile computing in construction , 2002 .

[17]  Kamel S. Saidi,et al.  The Value of Handheld Computers in Construction , 2002 .

[18]  José A. Pino,et al.  Supporting Group Decision Making and Coordination in Urban Disasters Relief , 2007, J. Decis. Syst..

[19]  Carl Gutwin,et al.  Aligning Work Practices and Mobile Technologies: Groupware Design for Loosely Coupled Mobile Groups , 2003, Mobile HCI.

[20]  José A. Pino,et al.  Integrating Service-Oriented Mobile Units to Support Collaboration in Ad-hoc Scenarios , 2008, J. Univers. Comput. Sci..

[21]  Abdelsalam Helal,et al.  Decentralized ad-hoc groupware API and framework for mobile collaboration , 2001, GROUP.

[22]  Steve Whittaker,et al.  Shared Workspaces: How Do They Work and When Are They Useful? , 1993, Int. J. Man Mach. Stud..

[23]  Ziga Turk,et al.  Construction informatics: Definition and ontology , 2006, Adv. Eng. Informatics.

[24]  Chimay J. Anumba,et al.  Mapping site processes for the introduction of mobile IT , 2004 .

[25]  Pedro Antunes,et al.  SaGISC: A Geo-Collaborative System , 2004, CRIWG.

[26]  Nelson Baloian,et al.  Handheld-Based Electronic Meeting Support , 2005, CRIWG.

[27]  Nelson Baloian,et al.  Handheld Electronic Meeting Support , 2005 .

[28]  César A. Collazos,et al.  Selecting Computing Devices to Support Mobile Collaboration , 2006 .

[29]  Satoru Iwashita,et al.  The application of PDA as mobile computing system on construction management , 2005 .

[30]  Candace K. Chan,et al.  High-performance lithium battery anodes using silicon nanowires. , 2008, Nature nanotechnology.

[31]  Joan Manuel Marquès,et al.  LaCOLLA: A Middleware to Support Self-sufficient Collaborative Groups , 2006, Comput. Artif. Intell..

[32]  Peter Tarasewich,et al.  Designing mobile commerce applications , 2003, CACM.