The Perspective Approach: Enabling Engineers to Easily Construct, and Integrate Geometric Views to Generate an Evolving, Integrated Project Model

Enabling engineers to construct integrated and task-specific views of an evolving AEC project is an important and unresolved issue in both practice and research. Many current project-modeling approaches construct and integrate a predefined central model from which task-specific views are constructed. Others construct and integrate a "federation" of predefined task-specific views. AEC processes have been slow to adopt these approaches. This paper formalizes the Perspective Approach, in which engineers from multiple disciplines iteratively construct geometric engineering views, called Perspectives, from information in other geometric Perspectives and control the integration of this multi-disciplinary, evolving Project Model as the project progresses. The paper describes an implementation of this approach on two test cases from the design and construction of the Walt Disney Concert Hall, showing how the Perspective Approach would enable engineers from multiple disciplines to construct and integrate task-specific views of an evolving AEC project more quickly, accurately, and simply than current practice allows.