Task Management System development for collaborative performance of building-yard workflows

Research about building information modeling (BIM) supports the complexity of building life cycle. This paper focuses the activities carried in and around a building-yard (building-yard workflow) to manage a design from its starting version to the delivery of the building to the customer. Many actors with different experiences and roles produce and exchange information often inconsistently, causing knowledge misalignment and lacking of relevant information. The evolution of CantiereOnLine vers. 1 is discussed, a BIM system focused to design management in building-yard. Adoption of end user development approach for designing workflows, workbench offered to users for semantic search from remote repositories, customization and integration of autonomous software components, and their storing; reinterpretation of the idea of Task Management System as a platform expandable with additional components realizing specific tasks; these main features led to COL vers. 2 as a TMS Editor. The workflow includes activities from the head office of a building enterprise to the building-yard: in the technical office, annotated and modified technical drawings and documents are validated and circulated in an accepted release, uploaded on mobile devices used in building-yards, where are annotated to indicate building variations and other additional information; the annotated drawings are sent back to the technical office. The workflow designer operates in COL workbench by means of visual commands and widgets representing task components, relations among them and operations which can be performed. Each component consists of its active part, based on Web Services technologies, and its semantic description expressed in Web Ontology Language standard, allowing organization of repositories based on a shared ontology.