Institute of Structural Engineering, Earthquake Engineering and Construction IT (IKPIR) is closely connected to the introduction of computing in Slovenian construction. Its core is made up of individuals who recognised the potential of computers in construction in the late 1960s and early 1970s and who, through decades of development, attracted many generations who saw digital technology as an important lever for progress. IKPIR has its roots in the Computing Center of the then Faculty of Architecture, Civil Engineering and Geodesy, founded in 1971, where the core of the IKPIR team - Janez Reflak, Peter Fajfar and Janez Duhovnik - came together. By 1981, the center, as a Support Unit of the Faculty for Computing, had become too narrow for its rich research, professional and educational work, and was renamed the Institute of Structural Engineering, Earthquake Engineering, and Construction IT. After the global development in the 1990s showed that construction informatics was an independent research and educational field within construction, two chairs were established within IKPIR: the Chair of Structural and Earthquake Engineering and the Chair of Construction Informatics. The core of the latter consisted of Iztok Kovačič, Vid Marolt, Žiga Turk, Matevž Dolenc, Tomo Cerovšek, Vlado Stankovski, Robert Klinc and Andreja Istenič Starčič, who are also the core of the eGradbeništvo research group. These organizational milestones also divide the work in the field of construction informatics in Ljubljana. In the first period, which began with batch processing, the computer was a tool that enabled faster analysis of structures and support in solving other types of problems - especially analytical ones. In the early 1980s with the advent of interactive equipment and personal computers, synthesis was added to analysis, i.e. construction, drawing and modeling. The computer becomes a tool with which the engineer designs and documents designs. With the advent of networks, especially the Internet, digital technology also takes on the role of a medium through which people and computer programs collaborate and exchange information, and construction informatics becomes an independent discipline with its own curricula, studies, conferences and scientific journals. Members of IKPIR have been in contact with the global state of the art and have also co-created it.
|