A Construction Business Automation System (CBAS)

Abstract

Delivering a constructed facility requires a contractor identifying, documenting, implementing, and executing thousands of business processes. Business Process Reengineering (BPR) and Automation (BPA) decompose business management into processes, and explore information sharing in a virtual enterprise setting. Workflow technology (WT) originated from Office Information Systems (OIS) supports definition, execution, coordination, and maintenance of business processes in a distributed environment. This research introduces a system prototype, named Construction Business Automation System (CBAS), for modeling and automating construction business processes by using workflow and object technologies. Automated construction management tasks, named Workflow Distributed Internet Applications (Workflow DNAs), support the reusability of the developed software components, simplify process modeling, and execute business processes. This paper presents the technologies developed in the prototype including: (1) the object-oriented reusable component technology for modeling construction management tasks, (2) the Construction Business Process Modeler (CBPM), (3) the Request Driving (RD) methodology for raising business requests and instantiating corresponding process instances, and (4) the workflow technology for executing business process instances. An example process is used to illustrate these involved topics.