CEE 214: Modeling Products, Processes and Organizations in the AEC Industry

M, W, 2:15 – 4:05 Agenda

Y2E2 292, the “CIFE iRoom”

John Haymaker & John Kunz

Objectives

In engineering, we use models in practice and research to describe systems and predict their behaviors. The objective of the class is to introduce students to modeling methods and good practices for using them. Through lecture and laboratory exercises departmental faculty introduce students to the theory and practice of modeling products, processes and organizations for architecture, engineering, and construction projects. Students practice the integrated use of these physical and computer-based mathematical, symbolic, and graphical models to understand and manage multiple project objectives at levels of detail.

The class will introduce the following issues of modeling:

· Purposes, which include ideal and realistic purposes or broad goals as well as specific measurable objectives of models and their use. Ideally, the specific objectives relate to the broad goals in a useful way, but a common challenge is to deal with the limitation that they do not relate directly.

· Form of a model, or the specific design choices made by the modeling team in response to the model purposes. We will consider both the conceptual forms (objects, attributes, relationships) of models and the specific ways we represent those forms in the computer to enable analyses. A common challenge is to understand the vocabulary and often the conceptual framework used by practitioners to describe real systems and to frame it in a conceptually consistent manner.

· Methods of models, or the inputs, outputs, and reasoning methods used in the models to make predictions, which can include mathematical, physical, symbolic and statistical methods. Depending on the methods, models can enable different kinds of predictions at different levels of precision and with different levels of generality. Another challenge is selecting and relating these methods for a specific problem.

· Level of detail of the represented forms and the precision of the methods, which relate to the complexity of the system being modeled, the purposes and the constraints of the modeling exercise. A universal modeling challenge is to establish and maintain appropriate levels of detail.

· Testing of the power and generality of the model and its predictions, which involves verification that the model represents those aspects of reality that relate to the purposes with enough accuracy to enable predictions of acceptable accuracy and precision. Another challenge is to verify model fidelity and predictive accuracy quickly and believably.

· Visualization of the model forms and analysis results. Given that a purpose of models is to describe a system and its behavior and most people normally understand graphical represents better than any other kind, we normally look to create visual representations of both the assumed forms of a system as we represent them in a model and the predictions of the analysis of the model. Another general challenge is to create visualizations that are clear, useful and can be created and changed quickly and accurately. 

Students will understand these issues through the introduction and application of several interrelated models for AEC. These models describe the objectives, alternatives, and performance of a project’s organization, processes and products. Specifically they will learn how:

· Project Models describe the things to manage on an AEC project. Students will learn to build models that help them manage the organizations involved in the project, the processes these organizations execute, and the products that they will produce.

· Process Models describe the tasks and relationships necessary to design, execute and operate the projects. Students will learn how to build and manage process models and the work they represent.

· Organization Models describe the people and companies involved in the project. Students will learn to build models of these organizations, and to relate them to a model of the processes, and to simulate the organizational potential to execute the process.

· Product Models describe the physical things that the organizations process. Students will learn how to construct Building Information Models.

· Performance Models describe the behavior of a process, organization, or product with respect to one or many project Objectives. Students will learn how to define metrics and analyze projects for schedule conformance, structural stability, energy consumption, and life cycle environmental performance.

· Integration Models help to define and manage the relationships between the above models. Students will learn to how to combine these models in communication, automation and decision assistance frameworks in order to optimize multidisciplinary project performance.

Students will learn the fundamental concepts for each of these models, practice building them for a simple case study, and develop a mindset for how to build and manage multiple models and levels of detail to manage project objectives.

Updated September 3 August 2009