GENERATING PROJECT ESTIMATES AND MONTHLY INTERIM VALUATION CERTIFICATES WITHIN AN INTEGRATED CONSTRUCTION ENVIRONMENT

Abstract

The AIC (Automation and Integration in Construction) Research Group at the University of Salford has developed a PC based integrated environment prototype -SPACE (Simultaneous Prototyping for An integrated Construction Environment). SPACE aims to incorporate various construction applications enabling project information to be shared between these applications and the user to run them simultaneously, i.e., concurrent engineering. The purpose of this paper is to present the EVALUATOR (Project Estimate and Intereim VALUation (Monthly) GenerATiOn in an IntegRated Environment) application of SPACE. EVALUATOR's main objectives are two fold; (i) to produce the project estimate in the form of an elemental Bill of Quantities (BQ), and (ii) to generate monthly interim valuation certificates from the construction plan. Previous work has adopted various structured analysis techniques to model this application as an integral part of the other applications in SPACE. The implementation of the resulting Express-G (static data) and IDEF0 (process) models into SPACE, leading to the development of EVALUATOR's estimating and monthly interim valuation modules are described.

Keywords:

• Integrated construction environment
• structured analysis
• project estimating module
• monthly interim valuation module
• objects
• attributes
• methods

Notes

Address for Correspondence: Professor Paul W. Jowitt, Dept. Civil and offshore Engineering, Heriott-Watt University, Edinburgh EH14 1HH, Scotland.