Collaborative Construction Planning: towards 4d Visualizations Adapted to Practitioners Requirements

Managing the intervention of various actors during the construction phase is a recurrent issue in the construction sector. This is partly due to the multiplicity of stakeholders and the need to manage interfaces necessary for efficient planning and coordination of construction tasks. 4D CAD technology appears to be an innovative approach to answer such issues. It consists in combining a 3D model with the time dimension, in order to simulate the progress of works construction along the time. Our main hypothesis is that the use of 4D to support the actors’ collaborative work is not adapted enough to the need of the sector because the classical view (Gantt + 3D model) does not take into account the specific requirements related to particular usages (planning of interventions and reservations request for a contractor; simulation and integration of works’ interfaces for an engineer, etc..). It is therefore challenging to adapt the visualization to business needs of users. Developments in Human-Machine Interface and Information Visualization fields could allow us selecting user views properties (I.e. Structure, Quantity of information displayable, Graphical attributes, Content description, Interaction principles, Business view) and compose “business views”. Therefore, the article propose taxonomy to describe user views in order to setup a method for business visualization design, enabling to: 1) Identify business tasks (usages) related to the roles of different users, 2) Offer services tailored to different usages, and 3) Suggest visualization modes fitting each usage on the basis of our visualization model. In a case study we formalize a collaborative process to identify the usages of each practitioners involved in the collaboration construction process planning. It especially targets collaborative management of works’ interfaces. Then, after defining the required services, we suggest combining visualization methods suitable for each use in order to achieve views composition for each stakeholder.