Management of Project Properties in “Virtual Archive” for Building Design Industry

Authors

  • Linas Gabrielaitis Vilnius Gediminas Technical University
  • Romualdas Bausys Vilnius Gediminas Technical University

Keywords:

engineering document management (EDM), electronic archive, virtual archive.

Abstract

The aim of this research is to reduce a project development time and costs in building design and construction industry. It is performed by managing project technical documentation and digital data, which involves the complete life cycle of design documentation and design-related data inside CAD applications. Life cycle of design documentation and design-related data is achieved through the engineering document management system (EDM). EDM system founded on electronic archive system, which stores and distributes all technical information. The electronic archive is based on reference model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS). As OAIS is a universal and uniform system, a technological development is required for customizing it to a specific industry (such as, building design and construction industry). Such development is presented in this work with an emphasis on management of projects document properties and their inheritance. The document properties play an important role in an archive, as they represent an instrument for performing any manipulations with a document (such as submission, distribution, search, modification and so on). Thus, any document placed in an archive has to be accompanied by document properties. This issue is addressed because the straightforward attachment of properties directly to a document introduces a lot of mistakes. This may lead to misplacement of document in archive system. Instead of this, in a proposed approach the properties were attached to the project structure (also called hierarchal tree).The previous developments in management of electronic archive were focused on the automatization of data gathering, processing and submitting. It allows storing the technical documentation according to the rules, which were based on the flow of documentation in a building design company. It was insured by additional models enclosed into the system - now called the “monolithic archive”. However, the growing requirements of engineers, and internal collaboration required across engineering departments, lead to the constant modification of “monolithic archive” and the basis of OAIS model. This introduces delays in engineering product design processes and requires an implementation of trainings and instructions. Therefore, the “monolithic” archive was fundamentally restructured rejecting all intermediate OAIS models. It was named as a “virtual” archive, since it operates from a “virtual” vault rather than a centralized vault.The objective of this work is to propose and implement a new development of an electronic archive system (named “virtual” archive) that offers a management of project document properties and inheritance in a structural way. A “virtual archive” was built for storing files that do not lock engineering documents into proprietary data vault. This open architecture prepares engineering to merge into a corporate environment without changing usually work routines. The document management and search in a distributed network can be performed by using Window File explore, Word, Excel, or CAD applications, thus avoiding any intermediate links. It provides all essential document management capabilities, property management, version control, advanced searching, user and work group management. A “virtual archive” maintains project properties, metadata and related files so that it enables properties inheritance and management of document properties. Property inheritance is established according to the project structure and components. It takes a form of hierarchical tree, which reflects the main phases of the construction process.

Additional Files

Published

2009-10-02

Issue

Section

ECONOMICS OF ENGINEERING DECISIONS