TR146: Integration of a Three Dimensional CAD Environment into an Interactive Workspace

In the design and construction process of a building the tasks to accomplish are distributed to many different participants. All these participants use different kinds of software applications which all use a different view of the overall project model.

The project's participants discuss mutual interactions within their models in meetings, in order to find the impacts of their work on the work of others. For example if the architect changes the geometry of parts of the projects building this will have effects on the cost estimation, as the quantities used in the estimation have changed. Due to a lack of adequate interfaces between the different used applications it is common practice within meetings to first explain and describe different circumstances as the one described above using paper based medias. Afterwards all participants of the meeting will update their application models.

Interactive workspaces integrate modern computer technologies in

order to enable data exchange and control between applications. This exchange then will hopefully be supportive for describing and explaining different problems occurring within a project meeting by using the software applications with which the participants model their respective views of the building.

The Center for Integrated Facility Engineering (CIFE) is developing such an interactive workspace. A number of different applications used in civil engineering are already integrated. Nevertheless it is not yet possible to work with a CAD environment commonly used by architects to model the geometrical aspects of the project model. This report describes the integration of such a CAD application within the iRoom.