Divercity: Distributed virtual workspace for enhancing communication and collaboration within the construction industry

DIVERCITY is a large EU funded project in the area of construction IT undertaken by a European consortium of researchers and practitioners from the construction industry. It is the acronym for Distributed Virtual Workspace for enhancing Communication within the Construction Industry and the prototype that presents the mechanism to smoothly and collaboratively conduct the construction projects from early briefing to the detailed design and even further by the end of the construction phase. To be precise, DIVERCITY aims to supply a shared virtual construction design and briefing environment that enables the construction industry to better undertake the client briefing and design review phases of a project. DIVERCITY comprises three main workspaces, which are client briefing, design review and construction workspaces respectively. Whilst the Client Briefing workspace enables architect to interact and communicate with client for capturing client needs, the design review workspace allows design team to review the design solution in different respects such as lighting, acoustic and thermal conditions and the construction workspace helps the planner evaluate optimum buildability for a building through communication with other parties of the design team and site planning and management. The paper presents the DIVERCITY system and its main six components: Client Briefing, Lighting, Acoustic, Thermal and Heating Simulations, Visual Product Chronology for construction planning, lastly Site planning & Analysis, how each of them handles different aspects of a construction project in a construction supply chain and how they complement each others to constitute a seamless integrated computer environment for the sake of excellence of briefing and design and construction planning.

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