Enhancing the competitiveness of the European construction industry in the digital economy

Funding bodies in general, and the European Commission in particular, have for over a decade funded project centred Research and Technology Development (RTD) efforts. While these have traditionally operated in isolation with little co-operation and cross-fertilization of results, a crucial requirement has emerged, following the latest advances in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), to have a more concerted and co-ordinated action aiming at a better integration, standardisation, dissemination and exploitation of the results from these projects across the European regions and countries. This has been clearly identified as a key requirement within the European Information Society and Technology (IST) Programme. In that respect, based on the promising results and achievements realized by the leading Construction IT community in Europe, a cluster project involving six IST funded projects has been set-up in order to achieve a better integration of research results in the area. This project, ICCI (IST-2001-33022), is targeting a specific sector: the Construction industry, and is addressing a wide spectrum of issues ranging from ICT implementation and deployment to organizational, social, and legal aspects. The paper gives (1) a background description of the context in which ICCI operates, (2) its aims and objectives, (3) the research results achieved to date by its partners within their respective IST project, and (4) a road map identifying areas of collaboration and expected impacts in the European Construction digital economy.