The engineering services of a universal e-Engineering Hub: Application to the construction industry

Although various e-Hubs have been developed in recent years, most of them are designed to facilitate the business aspect of online collaboration. The universal collaborative engineering e-Hub developed within the EU research project e-HUBs (e-Engineering enabled by Holonomic and Universal Broker Services) provides engineering services to facilitate collaborative project planning based on a particularly designed functional architecture and supporting technologies. This engineering service is particularly important for big enterprises to outsource some of the services to Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs). This paper first reviews the basic concept and the services provided by e-Hubs; then presents the engineering e-Hub’s functional architecture, and discusses the engineering services supported by the functional architecture through a construction scenario.