1998 Annual Meeting

1998 CIB W78 Annual Meeting
Thursday June 4
Stockholm, Sweden

Minutes of 1998 Meeting

These had been previously accepted as a true record having been circulated to members by e-mail and posted on the W78 web site.

Actions arising

These were all covered elsewhere on the agenda.

The Work Programme

• Use of Internet
  The work of the commission in this area focuses on the production of the electronic journal ITCon. Progress with this work was reported in detail in a parallel session preceding the commission meeting and was therefore not discussed in detail at the meeting.

• Virtual Building Model
  A colleague of Matti Hannus reported that some progress was being made with this in VTT. IAI were also progressing such a development as a test bed for IFC development. It was agreed that as soon as progress was made with such a model from either VTT or IAI, this would be brought to the attention of W78 members through the list server and web links.

• Virtual Building Model
  Poor progress is being made with this element of the work programme largely through difficulties in finding funds from within national research programmes and projects. It was agreed that this issue remained important to our collective efforts to have comparable building product data on which to base our work. A number of members of the commission agreed to continue to explore how their work might provide a solution to this need. Any member of the commission that feels they may be able to contribute complete product and process data about a building project for use by the commission is invited to approach the coordinator as soon as possible. Any possible solution to this need would be given an opportunity to make a prominent presentation of their work at the 1999 meeting.

• National IT Strategies
  Progress with this project has been made through the EU funded SCENIC project under a task led by Leopold Boi from CETE in France. Copies of the SCENIC report that has compared national IT strategies in France, Belgium, Sweden, Finland and the UK were made available at the meeting and can be obtained electronically from the coordinator. Members of the commission are invited to add their own data to this existing report as soon as possible. The opportunity to produce a CIB publication from this work has already been explored with the Secretary General and will be pursued further once further data has been collected. This project is led by Martin Betts. A deadline for receipt of further contributions of 1st November 1998 has been set.

• A new proposal was made for an activity to further develop a theme arising at the conference. This is to initiate a series of surveys of the state of use and exploitation of IT in different countries. This would build from work to date in collecting data from: UK, Australia, Hong Kong and South Africa using the Construct IT Strategic Health Check; from Denmark, Finland, Sweden and UK using the IT Barometer; and using other survey instruments in Ireland. The ongoing work for this project is to be led by Rob Howard of Denmark. Rob is forming an e-mail discussion group on this topic to which he will shortly circulate the results of his initial analysis of the commonality between existing instruments and proposals for how they can be integrated in the future. Other members of the commission are invited to contact the coordinator or Rob Howard at the earliest opportunity. The future of this element of the work programme would be that upon agreement of a common instrument, other countries would be invited to use it and present their results at the 1999 meeting. All countries would then be invited to repeat the use of the common instrument for reporting at the 2000 meeting.

Future Meetings

• 1999
  a detailed proposal was made for this to be held in Vancouver. This will be a joint event with the 8th International Conference on the Durability of Building Materials. This was being taken forward by Dana Vanier of NRC in consultation with Thomas Froese and Martin Fischer. The importance was stressed of invitations to W78 members for the event needing to clearly identify the W78 part of the conference as a W78 meeting in order to ensure support from commission member's institutions.

• 2000
  a proposal was made for this event to be hosted by the Icelandic Building Research Centre in Iceland. This proposal was accepted.

  Other offers for hosting future W78 meetings had been received from Georgia Tech in Atlanta, the University of Aarhus in Denmark and from the Construct IT Centre in Hong Kong. These would be considered as possible future venues for a W78 meeting after the year 2000. The possibility of the 2001 meeting being linked to the CIB Triennial World Congress was also raised.

Links to Other Activities

The opportunity for the commission to have closer links with IAI were discussed and it is hoped that the IAI will be able to hold a technical meeting in association with W78. This is to be discussed further by Dana Vanier and Arto Kivaniemi. The creation of the new task group 33 in concurrent engineering was announced to W78 members for the first time at this meeting. A number of W78 commission members expressed their considerable concern over the extent of overlap between this new task group and the commission particularly with regard to the plan to hold conferences in the same year at different locations. Despite reassurances that this was to be reviewed, and an attempt made to avoid it, this has not been achieved for 1999. Given the fact that TG33 was to last for only 3 years and to only hold conferences every two years, it is unclear how the overlap in conferences will affect W78 in the future.

Any Other Business

The Coordinator thanked Bo-Christer Bjork and Adina Jagbeck for having hosted the meeting.


Martin Betts June 9th 1998.