Support of Collaborative Business Process Networks in Aec

Projects in the building industry are extremely dynamic, driven by external conditions, modified user requirements and frequently changing business partners. Therefore, common principles should be established throughout the construction industry, which flexibly support the management of construction project information and processes. New members should be supported to easily join and leave the project consortium while still using their own ICT-applications. The need to rapidly set up such organizational structures and effectively manage these collaborative networks places high demands on the methods and models that are used to establish a common, homogeneous project structure. Therefore, this article presents an architecture for dynamic cross-enterprise processes’ planning, execution and controlling on a conceptual and application level. It is based on a Collaborative Business Process Management Lifecycle for virtual enterprises. For the adaptation of the architecture to the specific requirements of the AEC&FM-domain, a feasible Construction Network Scheme for the representation of strategic inter-organizational construction project information is introduced. Within this architecture, collaborative business process modeling will be achieved by the use of pre-defined process modules. Finally, the realization of the proposed models and methods are demonstrated in an example.