Investigating the future architecture of construction projects

Abstract

Japanese construction industry is currently struggling with technology development due to the resisting forces against introducing and developing new technologies into the construction sites. In order to analyze the current situation and develop the potential preferred architecture, ARIES, a system architecting framework is applied to the construction project team as the targeted enterprise in this research. First, the current architecture of the enterprise is analyzed from ten elements including landscape and stakeholder. While many ecosystem factors are driving technology development, it was made clear that the weak relationship of the construction project team with the leading-edge technology suppliers led to the team's lack of knowledge and information about new technologies, resulting in generating the resisting forces against introducing new technologies.

After analyzing the current situation, the envisioned future was created based on the capability of both the company and the construction project team. Second, in order to generate novel ideas about the alternative architectures, case studies of different industries were performed, where the importance of taking into account the supplier's needs and communicating continually with the workers on site was identified. After several alternative architectures were generated and evaluated by an unweighted decision matrix, the combined architecture consisting of the connecting platform and the on-site events was selected as the future architecture. Finally, based on the risk assessment, the detailed architecture and the implementation plan were developed, which have an emphasis on interaction between the connecting platform and the on-site events.

ARIES framework was applied to this research effectively in that both the current and future architecture of the enterprise were analyzed, evaluated, and validated from a holistic point of view. In addition, this research gave a valuable insight that interaction among multiple sub-systems is important for the entire system to work successfully. Considering that the research was performed by a single person, the author, the future work would be discussing the proposed architecture with other multiple members to improve it.