A Lessons-learned System for Construction Project Management: A Preliminary Application

AbstractConstruction companies are project-based organizations, since much of their knowledge is generated on site, from projects they carry out. In fact, projects are an important source of expert know-how and organizational knowledge, but lessons-learned from them are not systematically incorporated into subsequent projects, evidencing a lack of knowledge management and learning culture in local construction companies. This article describes a research effort that addressed this situation and developed a lessons-learned system to help construction companies to overcome these limitations. A multiple case-study methodology was applied to understand the knowledge and learning realities and needs of three Chilean construction companies. Based on these results, a mobile cloud-shared workspace to support knowledge management was developed. Results show that major concerns of users are associated with how the system acknowledges the particularities of construction projects and how it will be incorporated into daily activities. Main conclusions indicate that (1) companies acknowledge the need to develop a culture of innovation within the organization, (2) users consider the system as a tool that could really contribute to improve the construction project management process, and (3) the system needs improvements regarding database search and the Internet support before being fully implemented in the company as a project management tool

A Communication Model to Integrate the Request-Response and the Publish-Subscribe Paradigms into Ubiquitous Systems

The Request-Response (RR) paradigm is widely used in ubiquitous systems to exchange information in a secure, reliable and timely manner. Nonetheless, there is also an emerging need for adopting the Publish-Subscribe (PubSub) paradigm in this kind of systems, due to the advantages that this paradigm offers in supporting mobility by means of asynchronous, non-blocking and one-to-many message distribution semantics for event notification. This paper analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of both the RR and PubSub paradigms to support communications in ubiquitous systems and proposes an abstract communication model in order to enable their seamless integration. Thus, developers will be focused on communication semantics and the required quality properties, rather than be concerned about specific communication mechanisms. The aim is to provide developers with abstractions intended to decrease the complexity of integrating different communication paradigms commonly needed in ubiquitous systems. The proposal has been applied to implement a middleware and a real home automation system to show its applicability and benefits.This research work is funded by the Project P10-TIC-6600 granted by the Andalusian Regional Government, and the Project 20F2/36 granted by CEI-BioTIC Granada. This work has also been partially supported by the “Contrato-Programa, Facultad de Educacin y Humanidades de Ceuta 2010-2012” of the University of Granada

Revisión sistemática de la literatura sobre el desarrollo de sistemas colaborativos

Los sistemas colaborativos fueron concebidos para compartir información y coordinar actividades entre sus usuarios. Entendemos que existe una marcada complejidad tecnológica en desarrollar ambientes con estas características. Su diseño y desarrollo suele estar soportado por diversas herramientas y frameworks. Por otra parte, una revisión sistemática de la literatura es un medio para identificar, evaluar e interpretar todas las investigaciones relevantes disponibles a una pregunta de investigación particular. Es un proceso que consta de una serie de pasos secuenciales bien definidos que permiten conducir a una investigación. Motivadas en esto último, este trabajo desarrolla una revisión sistemática de la literatura con el fin de evaluar el estado del arte con respecto a aquellas herramientas de diseño disponibles para diseñar sistemas colaborativos.Facultad de Informátic