Vision on ICT Developments for the Building Sector

The building sector is entering a new era. Developments in information and communication technology have an impact throughout the entire life cycle of a building, not only from a process and technical point of view but also from a creative design point of view. As a result of developments of advanced modeling software for architectural design, the gap between what the architect can envision and what the building technician or product architect can materialize is enlarging. Internet technology has already started to provide a closer link between the participants in the building process, their activities, knowledge, and information. Concurrent and collaborative engineering will be the future of building practice in respect to efficiency and quality improvement of this sector. The nature of the building process is complex, not only from a communication point of view, but also from the information of the number of participants, the spatial organization and the infrastructure etc. In the near future, soft computing techniques such as artificial neural networks, fuzzy logic, and genetic algorithms will make contributions to the problem solving aspects of the complex design process. This paper provides an overview of these and other future developments of information and communication technology (ICT) within the building sector.