Using Context-awareness and Web-services to Enhance Construction Collaboration

The information intensive nature of construction projects requires project team members to have on-demand access to project information. However, existing mobile communication deployments in the construction industry rely on static modes of information delivery and do not take into account the worker’s changing context and dynamic project conditions. This often results in a mismatch between what an application can offer and the actual (data) requirements of mobile workers. This paper explains how awareness of user context (such as user profile/role, preferences, task, location, existing project conditions, etc.) can enhance construction collaboration by providing a mechanism to deliver pertinent information. Also, parallel to the recent developments in context-aware computing technologies, there are developments in Web Services which provide the ability to dynamically discover and invoke services regardless of operating system or programming language. This enables mobile workers to access, in real-time, different corporate back-end systems and multiple interenterprise project resources. This paper discusses how a combination of these two technologies allows for the creation of an intelligent communication infrastructure that can take intelligent decisions about when and how different resources and services should be used, based on the interpreted context. A framework is presented, which facilitates context capture, context brokerage and integration with legacy applications using a Web-Services based architecture. Aspects of the framework implementation which was based on a Pocket PC platform, are used to illustrate the use of context-aware computing technologies in realistic construction scenarios. Conclusions are drawn about the possible future impact of context-awareness and Web-Services technologies in the construction industry.