Welcome to the VBE II portal

This Virtual Building Environments (VBE) II project's web portal is dedicated to knowledge sharing on construction ICT adaptation and solutions enabling this adaptation. Topics of interest are the following (though not exhaustive):

• Quantification of benefits of using ICT in construction sector
• ICT implication and benefit measurement models and metrics
• ICT strategies and management issues in construction sector
• Case studies of construction ICT implementations.
  

VBE Finland

National VBE effort has
published results from VBE I
project carried out on 2003 -
2004. Please have a look on
Solutions! VBE I

VBE II project

Research and development project
Schedule: 2005/3 - 2007/3

Virtual Building Environments (VBE) II project is a pivotal opportunity for Finnish Real Estate and Construction Cluster (RECC) to establish an international competitive advantage in the design, construction and operation of buildings.

Virtual Buildings are digital representations of buildings that can be used for visualizing, analyzing and managing various aspects of buildings throughout their lifecycle; starting from the early design and ending to the demolition of the buildings.The use of Virtual Buildings is already providing competitive advantages to some RECC organizations.

VBE is referring to a group of software applications that, as a group, define a building, its parts, its behaviour and its performance. It facilitates the manipulation and storage of data that are used in the planning, design, construction and operation of a building. It makes it possible to conduct experiments on the building or with its parts, without first erecting the building or its parts. The VBE is being used as a general title in this project reflecting the situation where ICT modeling is exhaustively used for the building process throughout their lifecycle.

The main goal of the project initiative is the use of VBE tecknologies in RECC. Consequently, the initiative has several additional goals that will affect how the industry is likely to operate in the future. These range from effects on industry processes to enabling industry software interoperability, and from educating professionals to providing help on real life industry projects.

Goals for the participating RECC companies are that the use of VBE methods will provide clear competitive advantage like:

• Useful methods to evaluate the potential benefits and measure the benefits of the VBE methods
  
• Clear understanding of the possibilities and problems of the existing and emerging VBE technologies combined to the defined strategy how to implement the new technologies
  
• Advanced decision making support for building projects and company processes
• Measurable evidence of the efficiency of the VBE method

The VBE initiative is an organized effort to plan and create initial VBEs that will eventually spread expert inter-disciplinary deployment of multiple industry critical business applications around the world. It is an effort ability to use VBE that will prove the validity of the VBE concept and will serve as prototypes for additional VBEs in the future.

VBE II project key opportunities and challenges have been identified in the VBE I research and development project.

Sincerely,

VBE-Finland

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