Workshops
First Workshop: International Workshop on eBusiness in construction industry
eNVISION workshop in ECPPM Conference - 10-12 September 2008 - To be held in conjunction with the ECPPM 2008 conference
Motivation
Looking into the near future, business in Europe will be conducted through flexible networks of interdependent organizations. The future business scenario will be global, open and collaborative, dynamic and adaptive, frictionless and consistent. This evolution is assumed to be electronically supported.
The construction sector, in particular the building construction sector, is characterized by a high level of fragmentation, with a large number of participants in each construction project, being the large majority SMEs. The current global e-business solutions that exist in the market are too general and complicated for a small or medium company to use.
In order to meet future eBusiness requirements, SMEs need rely increasingly on the benefits of modern information and communication technology (ICT). However, the appropriate knowledge to deploy this technology in an effective and efficient way, is largely lacking, in particular knowledge regarding the cooperation in and between enterprises and knowledge regarding the interoperability of their information systems.
Focus and Goal
The goal of the workshop is to gather academics and practitioners in order to share innovative research issues and practical experiences, and to facilitate discussions about these issues, in particular about the notions of eBusiness application, architectural issues, business process modeling and ontology in construction and other industries.
Topics of interest to this workshop include, but are not limited to:
E-business in construction sector;
E-business scenarios for SMEs in construction sector;
E-tendering, e-procurement, e-site, e-quality;
Business process modeling in SMEs;
Architectural issues of eBusiness solutions ;
Innovative eBusiness solutions for SMEs;
Construction processes ontologies;
Semantic web in construction sector;
SMEs future needs in construction sector.
Organization of the Workshop
The workshop is organized by IST-028067 e-NVISION project consortium.
We are looking for articles on current or recently finished research projects as well as articles from practitioners. The workshop is planned again to be a real workshop, providing ample time for discussions. The focus of discussion will be on eBusiness construction sector problematic areas - Future scenarios for SMES, Cooperation and interoperability, architecture of eBusiness application, process modeling, ontologies and semantic web services.
Submission Conditions
Interested authors are invited to submit a full two-page abstract to the Conference Secretariat by January 31, 2008, addressing one or several of the topics of the conference. The abstract should clearly indicate the aims and conclusions of the work that will be included in the final paper, and include as well as (at least) 1 figure and 3 references. The abstract should be in English, with no more than 2000 words.
Important dates for the workshop are:
Two Pages Abstract: January 31, 2008
Notification of Acceptance: March 31, 2008
Submission of full paper: June 1, 2008
Conference: September 10-12, 2008
Second Workshop: Challenges in Creating Collaborative Workspaces in the Construction and Civil Engineering Industry
Motivation
The construction industry is faced with a dilemma that until building is in progress some problems are not foreseen and this has impact on the handover time to the customer. This invariably implies default and penalty clauses that affect the profitability and the ROI for the builder.
One way to overcome this situation is to create collaborative workspaces in which all the stakeholders can come together to simulate and assess the design and the construction processes before the construction phase to avoid such unforeseen problems. However, with the view to reducing the time, many projects tend to start the construction phase before the design is completed or fully analysed, therefore leading to unforeseen problems during the construction phase.
These frequent unforeseen situations require a decision or action urgently. Such decisions often require a chain of authorisation involving a diversity of actors. These situations may fall outside the responsibility of the operative on site, though he might nonetheless initiate a decision or knowledge acquisition process that is likely to engage these actors and other experts. All these events could be categorised under the umbrella of unforeseen events on site, which could take various forms such as health & safety concerns and constructability difficulties. In such situations, there is a need for extensive collaboration between various actors involving complex design and construction information.
The purpose of this workshop is to explore the challenges in creating real-time collaborative workspaces which allow decision makers to come together to create sound designs or to respond quickly to solve unforeseen problems discovered during the construction phase.
Focus and Goals
The goal of this workshop is to gather academics and practitioners to explore the following research questions :
What are the deficiencies in current collaborative practices and what is our vision for future collaborative workspaces in the construction industry ?
Given the advances in technologies such as communication, mobile devices, visualisation, middleware and display devices, how can we create collaborative workspaces to provide seamless interaction among stake-holders in a construction project ?
How can we develop a data sharing framework for the stakeholders to collaborate with appropriate security and quality of service ?
What new interfaces can we exploit to develop human and task centric collaborative workspaces.
Submission Conditions
Interested authors are invited to submit a full two-page abstract to Prof. Terrence Fernando (t.fernando@salford.ac.uk) by March 15th , 2008, addressing the issues relevant to the focus of this workshop. The abstract should clearly indicate the aims and conclusions of the work that will be included in the final paper. The abstract should be in English, with no more than 2000 words.
All abstracts will be reviewed according to usual international scientific practice, and information on the acceptance of abstracts and for the preparation of the full papers will be given according to the schedule above. All accepted papers will be published in the ECCPM 2008 Conference Proceedings (under an ISBN reference), but only if one of the authors or representatives is present at the Conference. A selection of best papers will be proposed to the ITCon journal, with potential edition of extended detailed papers.
Important dates for the workshop are:
Two Pages Abstract: March 15th , 2008
Notification of Acceptance: March 31, 2008
Submission of full paper: May 31st , 2008
Conference: September 10-12, 2008
Contact Details of the Session Organiser :
Prof. Terrence Fernando,
Scientific Director of the Think Lab,
Director of the Future Workspaces Research Centre,
Maxwell Building, Think Lab, University of Salford,
Salford M5 4WT.
Email : t.fernando@salford.ac.uk
Tel : 0044 161 295 5164