Collaborative Networks and Active Knowledge Architectures - A Road Building Case

The planning, designing and building of roads is an extensive process that takes several years and involve several actors from industry and the public sector. This paper reports the collaboration with the Norwegian Road Authority on using the Active Knowledge Architecture approach and Visual Modelling methods to support road planning, design and building. The experience is based on the work conducted on real parts of the E6 Motorway, being built north of Trondheim, Norway. The purpose of the knowledge architectures presented in this paper is to improve collaboration and to share knowledge among all the stakeholders in the process. Road planning projects will benefit from agile collaborative networks and active knowledge bases built by knowledge models and architectures. Important lessons learned include the need for holistic design methods, instant data-driven collaboration, and agile approaches and work environments for continuous planning, design and building.