A personal planning approach for the integration and coordination of multi-project process information

This paper outlines the design of a system realised as part of the EU ISTforCE project (IST- 1999-11508) that satisfies the requirements for process management in the virtual enterprise of constructional engineering. The Personal Planning Service (PPS) developed enables users in the A/E/C domain to work more efficiently in different project contexts by maintaining an enterprise-wide infrastructure, allowing M:N user/project authentication and providing individual workflows for each user. It helps to establish a coherent solution for the personalized planning of activities and work processes while supporting the engineer in obtaining the relevant information related to the tasks and projects he participates in. To accomplish this, the critical path of a project as well as the buffer times are calculated using methods of the Graph Theory. Thereafter, the user’s tasks are separated, sorted, and merged into a personal workflow.