MDSSF: a federated architecture for product procurement

In the AEC (Architecture / Engineering / Construction) industry, large construction projects are tackled by consortia of companies and individuals, who work collaboratively for the duration of the project. The consortia include design teams, product suppliers, contractors and inspection teams who must collaborate and conform to predefined scheduling constraints and standards. These projects are unique, complex and involve many participants from a number of organisations. Construction projects require consortia to procure supplies such as building materials and furniture from product suppliers. In large AEC projects, procurement of products, services and construction materials is an important and time consuming activity. Materials are sourced on a global basis from a large number of suppliers. The scale of the purchases made in large projects show that their procurement is a non-trivial exercise. Therefore, consortia members or the contractors require access to a large body of information about products or material information to aid procurement decision making. Web based communication and network technologies play an increasingly important role in supporting collaboration in AEC projects. However collaborative working in the construction industry is still restricted by the current limitations of network and communication technologies and their system architectures which are usually client/server based. The construction industry has been examining how the advancements in distributed computing technologies such as the Grid computing can remove some of the existing limitations and enhance collaboration. This research investigated how the procurement challenges such as accessing up-to-date product information available from a large number of products suppliers in an integrated manner using standard means could be addressed. A novel solution to the procurement challenges in the form of a distributed information sharing architecture is presented. The architecture uses the concepts of federated databases such as distribution of data and autonomy of databases and couples it with Grid computing to facilitate information exchange in a collaborative, coherent and integrated way to address the product procurement challenges