This award supports Professor Martin Fischer and a graduate student from Stanford University to collaborate in civil engineering research with Professor A. Schub and colleagues of the Institute for Geotechnical and Construction Engineering of the Technical University of Munich, Germany. Both groups are conducting research in the application of information technology to construction project management, but they bring complementary expertise in project planning and control to the joint effort. The strength of the Stanford group lies on the construction planning side, the link of planning to product and computer-aided-design models of facilities, and in the symbolic modeling of engineering systems and processes. The German group brings expertise in time and cost control of construction projects, the use of information technology for real-time schedule and cost control, and it has close links to the construction industry which will be useful in validating the research. The joint effort of these two research groups is very likely to achieve their mutual goal of developing computational models of construction methods in order to improve existing construction planning, scheduling and cost estimating systems.
