Traditionally, the design and construction industry face many barriers to developing and implementing new technologies, including the threat of litigation, government regulations, code restrictions, and the high cost of insurance. Further, since each civil structures by its nature tends to be unique, there is, in contrast to other manufacturing sectors, a resulting lack of opportunity for mass production imposed by the "one off'' production environment. This in turn creates special need for innovation in design procedures and construction techniques that are peculiar to this profession. Computers can play a significant role as an enabling technology to support future innovation in the design and construction industry.

In the past, computer has been used in structural engineering primarily as a computational tool that has improved the accuracy of structural response prediction and has assisted in many routine design tasks. In this respect, much has been accomplished in the last three decades and much more can be accomplished through advanced research in computational mechanics and computer-aided engineering. There is however at least one other important area that can take significant advantages of computing technologies. That is the utilization of the computer as a communicator of information through proper information management tools. In a multidisciplinary project of facility engineering, much information is generated that must be passed on within and between disciplines. At the present time, this information is generated many times over in a time consuming and error prone process. The computer can serve as a storage, management, visualization as well as communication medium in which the information is generated only once and is augmented and retrieved in the various phases of the facility engineering process. Furthermore, computers can be employed to simulate the fabrication, design, erection and operation processes of a constructed facility. Current research activities are concerned with the design and construction of facility engineering, from the viewpoint of integration with all disciplines involved in the process. We are focusing our developments in the following areas:

Our work in this field will have considerable impact because of the combined expertise provided by faculty members of our program and the computer science department and because of the strength and lateral support given to this research field by the Center for Integrated Facility Engineering (CIFE).