Framework for Providing Customized Data Representations for Effective and Efficient Interaction with Mobile Computing Solutions on Construction Sites

Abstract

Conceptual representations of information contained in product and process models are often difficult to use for accessing data when performing engineering tasks. This is especially true if project-management information contained in product and process models needs to be made accessible on a mobile computer on construction sites. To make this information accessible, customized conceptual and visual information representations are needed. For the project-management tasks of progress monitoring and creating and administering punch lists, existing approaches that provide access to relevant project information are ineffective and inefficient in transforming information from product and process models into usable representations. As a result, these applications do not always provide information representations that are of the required structure, granularity, and type. In this paper, we describe a navigational model framework, which is an approach that effectively and efficiently creates and manages different views of information contained in product and process models. We validated this framework by implementing a prototype system and testing it through a designed set of experiments. The use cases for these experiments were established in an extensive study on the information and data collection needs on construction sites.