CITYWORK: Application of Collaborative Technologies for Infrastructure Management

This paper describes a collaborative maintenance management application called CITYWORK being developed for the Public Works Department at the Fort Gordon Army Installation in Augusta, Ga. The work described in this paper is being carried out in the context of project "CITY" (Civil Infostructure TechnologY-National Science Foundation Grant No. ECS94-22730) to support the sustainable management of civil infrastructure. Infrastructure management requires the coordination of a variety of efforts and integration of information across a range of facilities. CITYWORK addresses coordination, collaboration, and integration in the maintenance management process in a context of sound organizational behavior. The project involves an interdisciplinary team including engineers and social scientists from the IMPACT laboratory at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and U.S. Army Construction Engineering Research Laboratories, Champaign, Ill. CITYWORK supports the maintenance workflow process by providing private, persistent workspaces for each participant to work on the specific aspects of their interests (e.g., estimators work on generating cost estimates) and share the work with others in an asynchronous manner.