Book Description

Importance of supply chain integration has been shown in many industry sectors. The construction industry is one of the least integrated among all major industries. One of the major reasons is that construction supply chains are unstable and often consist of numerous distributed members, most of which are small and medium construction companies. With the proliferation of the Internet and the current maturity of web services standards, service oriented architecture (SOA) with open source technologies is a desirable computing model to support construction supply chain integration and collaboration due to its flexibility and low cost. This thesis investigates and demonstrates the potential of the current web services technologies and SOA for construction supply chain collaboration and management, through a prototype service oriented system framework, namely SC Collaborator (Supply Chain Collaborator). SC Collaborator is designed and implemented according to the system requirements for construction supply chain integration. The framework leverages web services and portal technologies, open standards, and open source packages. Although some web services systems allow user connection and integration through web services protocol, their system functions and operations are fixed and not adaptive to changes. The SC Collaborator framework enables flexible reconfiguration of internal service invocation, integration, and system layout without recompilation of the system. To align a collaborative system with the supply chains it integrates, this thesis proposes and demonstrates the incorporation of supply chain models in a service oriented system framework. Specifically, the Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR) framework, a widely used model developed by the Supply Chain Council, is employed to model construction supply chains. The SCOR modeling framework provides a generic and hierarchically structured means to specify supply chain networks and processes. The SCOR process elements and operations are wrapped as individual web service units, which are integrated and orchestrated in the service oriented SC Collaborator framework. A case example on a student center construction project is used to illustrate the SCOR modeling framework for performance monitoring. The SC Collaborator framework is also extended to support collaboration among distributed service oriented collaborative systems. Due to the temporary project-based relationship among participants in construction projects, project participants that do not have direct business partnership may hesitate to expose and share sensitive and proprietary information with each other. The distributed SC Collaborator framework allows users to specify shared information and data. This thesis discusses how information consistency is ensured among distributed SC Collaborator systems. The distributed network of SC Collaborator systems is tested with a case scenario of a completed expansion project of a three-storey residential building.