Automated verification for collaborative workflows in a Digital Plan of Work

This paper presents the rationale, strategy and development behind the Verification components of the UK Digital Plan of Work (DPoW), a large-scale interdisciplinary collaboration platform implemented to enhance collaborative Building Information Modelling (BIM) workflows. Construction enterprises currently organise their information exchanges through documents that are not suitable for the automation of quality assurance processes. The DPoW addresses this issue with the introduction of a documented collaboration format and a suite of associated verification libraries, available at no cost as open source packages. The resulting infrastructure has the potential to automate the management of information exchanges in multi-disciplinary construction projects, but its uptake may be impeded by known issues that affect the dynamics of technology adoption. The verification infrastructure has been designed to reduce the impact of these issues by providing immediate paths to adoption and enabling three levels of process feedback for sustainable incremental improvements, starting from the current maturity level. The research followed the Design Science Methodology and is presented in this paper progressing from the definition of goals and objectives to the presentation of the developed solution, ending with a summary of known limitations and areas of further development.