TY - CHAP A1 - O'Brien, William A1 - El-Mashaleh, Mohammad T1 - An Empirical Study Relating Construction Firm Performance and IT Utilization N2 - This paper examines the impact of information technology (IT) utilization on construction firm performance. Based on empirical data collected from 74 US construction firms, the analyses provide evidence that IT has a positive impact on overall firm performance, schedule performance, and cost performance. Firm performance is a composite score of several metrics of performance: schedule performance, cost performance, customer satisfaction, safety performance, and profit. No relationship is found between IT utilization and customer satisfaction, safety, or profit, although this may be due to limitations of the study given strong correlations between IT utilization and cost and schedule performnance. The empirical evidence of positive association between performance and IT use provided by this research is significant to both construction practice and research literature. This evidence should encourage firms to adopt and invest in IT tools. KW - Architektur KW - Verteiltes System KW - Informationstechnik KW - Unternehmen Y1 - 2004 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:gbv:wim2-20111215-1739 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Rodriguez, Adhamina T1 - Information Exchange in The Construction Industry : The Particular Case of Green Buildings N2 - Construction is a conservative industry that over the last twenty ye ars has experienced drastic changes in the way that interdisciplinary teams interact to design and execute a project. In this article we offer a general overview of how the main participants cooperate in the different phases of a construction project, and which are some of the main areas for communication improvement. We also explore the communication tools used in the exchange of information, and identify the main causes of information breakdown. The general framework of this study is of application to both standard and green projects. At the end of the article we discuss the peculiarities of green buildings. Our goal is to offer a series of industry insights derived from the perspective of a general contractor aimed at identifying the areas where contributions in computing and information exchange could have a greater impact on the successful completion of a project. KW - Architektur KW - Verteiltes System KW - Informationsaustausch Y1 - 2004 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:gbv:wim2-20111215-1757 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Tsou, Jin-Yeu A1 - Lam, Selina A1 - Wong, Wing Kin Gary T1 - Design of Rapidly Assembled Isolation Patient Ward – IT-Supported Collaborative Design Process between Architects and Medical Officers N2 - An important feature of the 2003 SARS outbreak in Canada, Singapore, and Hong Kong was that many health care workers (HCWs) developed SARS after caring for patients with SARS. This has been ascribed to inadequate or ineffective patient isolation. However, it is difficult for dense cities to provide sufficient isolation facilities within a short period of time. This has raised concerns from the public for new strategies in the planning and design of isolation facilities. Considering that SARS or other infectious diseases could seriously damage our society’s development, isolation facilities that could be rapidly and economically constructed with appropriate environmental controls are essential. For this reason, the design team of the Department of Architecture collaborated with a special task force from the Faculty of Medicine, who are the frontline medical officers treating the SARS patients, to design Rapidly Assembled Isolation Patient Wards. Both architecture and medicine are well established disciplines, but they have little in common in terms of the mode of knowledge construction and practice. This induced much intellectual exploration and research interest in conducting this study. The process has provided an important reference for cross disciplinary studies between the architectural and medical domains. KW - Architektur KW - Verteiltes System KW - Krankenhaus KW - SARS Y1 - 2004 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:gbv:wim2-20111215-1748 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Petzold, Frank A1 - Donath, Dirk T1 - The building as a container of information : the starting point for project development and design formulation N2 - For planning in existing built contexts, the building survey is the starting point for initial planning proposals, for the diagnosis and documentation of building damages, for the creation of objectives catalogues, for the detailed design of renovation and conversion measures and for ensuring fulfilment of building legislation, particularly by change of use and refitting. An examination of currently available IT-tools shows insufficient support for planning within existing contexts, most notably a deficit with regard to information capture and administration. This paper discusses the concept for a modular surveying system (basic concept, separation of geometry from semantic data, and separation into sub-systems) and the prototypical realisation of a system for the complete support of the entire building surveying process for existing buildings. The project aims to contribute to the development of a planning system for existing buildings. ... KW - Architektur KW - Verteiltes System KW - Lebenszyklus KW - Bauwerk Y1 - 2004 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:gbv:wim2-20111215-1848 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Schink, Claus-Jürgen A1 - Koch, Volker T1 - Interdisciplinary Cooperation Modules in Mobile Networks N2 - The contribution describes the didactical integration of wireless access networks for the campus of the University of Karlsruhe in the education of architects and engineers. It focuses on the development of an interdisciplinary communication network to encourage and promote the communication and collaboration between students. The project assumes that significant learning progresses in net-based learning scenarios are based upon the synchronous and asynchronous cooperation between the students themselves. The remote cooperation across borders of disciplines makes high demands on capacity in communicating and cooperating of the involved persons as well as on the supporting tools. Therefore, the collective acquisition of knowledge and cooperation has to be trained intensively during the studies. Based on the design and project oriented cooperation platform netzentwurf.de the authors developed the tools “Jobadmin“ to administrate multidisciplinary workgroups, the “Swarm Knowledge Catalogue“ to collect and store knowledge and “LivingCampus“, an instrument providing basic services for dynamic communication. KW - Architektur KW - Verteiltes System KW - Mobile Computing KW - Rechnernetz Y1 - 2004 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:gbv:wim2-20111215-1788 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Ren, Aizhu A1 - Shi, Jianyong A1 - Xu, Yun T1 - Modeling of Buildings and Roads for Urban Applications based on 2D Digital Maps N2 - Three-dimensional models of urban objects play an important role in the urban applications such as urban planning, environmental concerning, or urban disaster mitigations. While the modeling of urban objects is time consuming and storage costing. This paper presents solutions for this. Buildings with regular shapes and plane roofs are constructed into computer models by identifying of graphic elements from the digital maps of urban area to get building base plane and building heights. Buildings with irregular shapes and non-plane roofs are constructed into computer models by employment of a specific system developed by the authors. Road objects and topologies are constructed into computer models by employment of specific algorithms. The solutions presented in this paper has been used in the development of urban disaster mitigation system for Shantou, China. KW - Architektur KW - Verteiltes System KW - Geoinformationssystem Y1 - 2004 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:gbv:wim2-20111215-1791 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Petzold, Frank A1 - Bartels, Heiko A1 - Donath, Dirk T1 - New techniques in Building Surveying N2 - Building activities in the construction industry in Germany increasingly concentrate on building measures in or involving the existing built environment. Before planning can begin, buildings must be surveyed in whole or in part with the surveying of geometric data playing a dominant role. The geometric survey is typically undertaken using geodetic or photogrammetric measuring techniques and equipment that have been adapted for use in building surveying. Accordingly appropriate technical knowledge is required in order to be able to operate them as well as a considerable financial investment. Such equipment and surveying methods are usually adaptations from other disciplines. The paper discusses and presents approaches to developing “new” equipment for building surveying, devised with the needs of building surveying in mind – redesigns or new designs for surveying tools. The designs are the result of an inter-disciplinary project between the Faculty of Architecture and the Faculty of Product Design at the Bauhaus Universität Weimar. KW - Architektur KW - Verteiltes System KW - Bausubstanz Y1 - 2004 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:gbv:wim2-20111215-1803 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Petersen, Michael A1 - Diaz, Joaquin T1 - Integrated planning of buildings based on computer models in project communication systems N2 - The increasing demands in building and civil engineering – with regard to the growing amount of legal requirements and the needs of a flexible usage of the building - requires an optimisation of all processes during the planning and construction phases. This aim can be only reached by transferring of innovative information and communication technologies in the field of cooperation of all partners in a building project. In this article the enhancement of the existing planning processes based on an improved information management is introduced. Since the late 90ies the availability of hardware and software infrastructures for a networkbased cooperation, e.g. email, in small and middle-sized companies increased the problems of an unstructured communication in the planning and construction processes. These problems have not been solved by the usage of the upcoming project communication systems either, which are often used as a simple medium for data transfer. Because of the easy way of distributing documents to all planning partners a huge amount of files and subsequent versions can be stored so that the planners often have to scope with an information overflow. The underlying hierarchical structures based on simple files stored in tree views are not sufficient for an adequate representation of the different specific views of the planners and the management of relationships between the three information domains building structure, costs and time schedules. .. KW - Architektur KW - Verteiltes System KW - Integrierte Planung Y1 - 2004 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:gbv:wim2-20111215-1762 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Hauschild, Thomas A1 - Hübler, Reinhard T1 - Entwicklung eines verteilbaren und kooperativ nutzbaren objektorientierten CAAD-Produktmodellierkerns N2 - Der Fokus des Projektes liegt auf einer besseren Unterstützung der kooperativen Aspekte im Bauwerksentwurf und der Anwendung von ComponentWare-Techniken in der Architektur des Entwurfssystems. Es muß festgestellt werden, daß die Kooperation der Beteiligten im Entwurfsprozeß von Bauwerken durch die heute praktizierten Datenaustauschverfahren nicht oder nur unbefriedigend unterstützt wird und das keine Lösung dieses Problems durch die Weiterentwicklung von filebasierten Datenaustauschformaten zu erwarten ist. Im Rahmen des Projektes wird mit einer CORBA-Umgebung für Smalltalk-80 ein verteilbares Objektsystem realisiert. Als Architektur des Systems wurde eine hybride Herangehensweise gewählt, bei der allgemeine Informationen auf einem zentralen Server verwaltet werden und die eigentlichen Projektinformationen bei Bedarf repliziert werden. Wie allgemein in GroupWare - orientierten Systemen notwendig, müssen effektive Mechanismen der Nebenläufigkeitskontrolle und zur Sperrung bestimmter Modellbereiche realisiert werden. Wichtig ist für kooperative Entwurfssysteme die Systemunterstützung der Beseitigung der Folgen von kollidierenden Entwurfsintensionen durch die Bearbeiter. Dazu werden unter anderem Remote-Pointer-Mechanismen realisiert. In Abhängigkeit von der Rolle eines Bearbeiters werden diesem Sichten auf des Objektmodell (Partialmodelle) zugeordnet. Es werden Mechanismen zur Autorisierung des Zugriffs auf Partialmodelle implementiert, zu diesem Zweck erfolgt eine Nutzerauthentifizierung. Beziehungen zwischen Partialmodellen werden durch eine spezielle Relation im Objektsystem abgebildet. Die Konzeption des Objektsystems lehnt sich an die PREPLAN-Philosophie an. Das impliziert die Unterstützung von Entwurfshandlungen sowohl in Bottom-Up- als auch in Top-Down - Richtung. Benutzer können das Objektsystem um eigene Klassen erweitern bzw. existierende Klassen modifizieren und Attribute mit Defaultwerten belegen, um das System inkrementell mit Domänenwissen anreichern zu können. Von großer Bedeutung für kooperative Entwurfssysteme sind eine Versionsverwaltung und die Bereitstellung von Undo - und Redo - Mechanismen. Es ist möglich, multimediale Daten im Objektmodell abzulegen und diese in Abhängigkeit von ihrem Format wiederzugeben bzw. zu bearbeiten. Das beschriebene System befindet sich derzeit in der Implementierung. KW - Bauwerk KW - Architektur KW - CAD KW - Datenaustausch Y1 - 1997 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:gbv:wim2-20111215-4475 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Sariyildiz, Sevil A1 - Schwenck, M. T1 - An Integrated Software Environment for the Architectural Design Process N2 - The general motivation of this research is to develop software to support the handling of the increased complexity of architectural design. In this paper we describe a system providing general support during the whole process. Instead of only developing design tools we are also addressing the problem of the operating environment of these tools. We conclude that design tools have to be integrated in an open, modular, distributed, user friendly and efficient environment. Two major fields have to be addressed - the development of design tools and the realisation of an integrated system as their operation environment. We will briefly focus on the latter by discussing known technologies in the field of information technology and other design disciplines that can be used to realise such an environment. Regarding the first subject we have to state the need of a detailed tool specification. As a solution we suggest a strategy where the tool functions are specified on the basis of a transformation, where a hierarchical process model is mapped into specifications of different design tools realising appropriate support for all sub-processes of architectural design. Using this strategy the main steps to develop such a support system are: implementation of a framework as basis for the integrated design system decision whether the tool specification are already implemented in available tools in this case these tools can be integrated using known methods for tool coupling otherwise new design tools have to be developed according to the framework KW - Architektur KW - CAD Y1 - 1997 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:gbv:wim2-20111215-4447 ER -