Knowledge enabled collaborative engineering in AEC

One of the key challenges of knowledge management is to provide the applicable knowledge to the right person at the right time. Knowledge Management (KM) is now recognised as a core business concern and intellectual assets play a vital role in gaining competitive advantage. Within the AEC industries, where the drive for innovation and improved business performance requires the effective deployment and utilisation of project knowledge, such need for strategic knowledge management is also acknowledged (Kamara et al. 2002). From the point of view of KM especially targeting design and engineering domains the Knowledge Enabled Engineering (KEE) approach is a reference concept that was introduced (in part) to allow re-explore what KM represents within an Engineering context. However, KEE was not conceived with the goal of supporting synchronous collaboration for developing high-performance collaborative workspaces. This paper presents a new approach, Knowledge Enabled Collaborative Engineering (KECE), which goes beyond and complements KEE, to realise a knowledge-based solution for collaborative design and engineering. A roadmap to KECE is then drafted based upon the degree of knowledge support of the solution - Initial, Advanced and Future Workspaces - to progress towards its implementation.