Industry foundation classes for project management - A trial implementation

An effort is underway to develop Industry Foundation Classes-industry- standard data structures for exchanging information about construction projects. In addition to physical information about buildings, these classes represent project management information such as estimating and scheduling data. Many core concepts relating to the project management portions of the Industry Foundation Classes have recently been added to these models, but these have received virtually no testing and implementation to date. A workshop was held to work through an implementation and evaluation exercise for these models. The results identified many areas for potential improvement, but also confirmed that the overall approach taken by the models worked well for representing and integrating product, work process, estimating, and scheduling information.