Compared with other industries, construction has maintained one of the lowest growth rates in productivity and innovation over the last decades. Moreover, low compliance with schedule targets has remained a common issue throughout projects. Therefore, although methodologies developed have benefited productivity in design, construction and operation, meeting client and project objectives becomes challenging without properly integrating organization, information, systems and processes. This perspective introduces the Virtual Design and Construction (VDC) framework. First, this paper studies and reviews VDC since its creation at the Center for Integrated Facility Engineering (CIFE) of Stanford University in 2001. After that, a comprehensive bibliographical review of the VDC framework is presented and updated with examples of its application in construction projects, delving into its element...

Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) teams are increasingly using emerging management methods involving collaboration, lean construction, and digitization for managing projects. Production metrics (PM) are being used to assess the impact of these methods on project performance during run-time. A lack of common vocabulary hinders comparison of PM, making it difficult to repeat strategies used for improving project performance and for benchmarking PM across projects. Through a detailed content analysis, 2 datasets of 904 PM reported by 195 Virtual Design and Construction (VDC) practitioners in Scandinavia and Latin America were curated. Qualitative coding was used to categorize the PM into the three key VDC elements, i.e., Integrated Concurrent Engineering (ICE), Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Project Production Management (PPM) and to validate the categorization. This...

Learning-centered models, which rely on active methodologies such as Project-Based Learning (PBL), should be adopted in undergraduate programs to potentiate the development of collaboration skills within future industry professionals like civil engineers. Thus, this study reports the implementation of PBL in two successive Virtual Design and Construction (VDC) courses from an undergraduate civil engineering program: 1) VDC I, in which the VDC methodology implementation was applied theoretically in an already-built project, and 2) VDC II, in which the VDC methodology implementation was applied in a currently-under-construction project. The study's objective is to identify students' perceptions of PBL influence on their learning experience, degree of acquisition of generic competencies, and project development under the VDC methodology. To assess the PBL and VDC implementation, a survey wa...