Virtual design and construction

Virtual Design and Construction (VDC) is the use of integrated multi-disciplinary performance models of design-construction projects to support explicit and public business objectives. Professor Levitt’s Virtual Design Team (VDT) project provided a fundamental point of departure of this work: the organisation model provides a central theoretical and practical element in the VDC framework. VDC models are virtual because they are computer-based descriptions of the project. This paper summarises the VDC framework that integrates an organisation perspective with perspectives that are implicit in VDT, including 3D Building Information Model (BIM) product models of a product to be designed, built and operated – typically a physical facility – management by objectives, Lean production management and the social method of Integrated Concurrent Engineering (ICE). Thus, VDC project models emphasise those aspects of the project that can be designed and managed, i.e., the product (typically a building or plant facility), the organisation that will define, design, construct and operate it, and the process that the organisation teams will follow. Many companies and hundreds of professionals now use VDC methods, and they consistently find that they improve project and business performance.