Virtual cost engineering studio (V-CES): A framework for Cost Engineering services

Cost has become a business driver. V-CES is a European Project aiming to develop and deploy a set of services to the Cost Engineering Community: Training, a Cost Engineering Virtual Community, a Cost Estimating Tool, and a Cost Engineering Database. The access to such services will be done via Internet and a Web browser. This implies the possibility for the cost professionals of exercising a just-in time training, estimating and consulting related to their work. The use of these services implies interactions of the kind client-server and peer-to-peer, and their implementation demands the use of different software technologies, being the main ones: Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), database, multi-agent toolkit, and reasoning engine. This paper presents the technological definition of the framework to be used for the over all development and implementation.