TY - CHAP A1 - Melhem, Hani A1 - Cheng, Yousheng T1 - Numeric Prediction Algorithms for Bridge Corrosion N2 - The research reported in this article was conducted to mainly explore the two common numeric prediction techniques, the model tree and the regression tree, when used in conjunction with bagging as a wrapper method. Bagging is used to improve the prediction accuracy of these two algorithms, and results are compared with the ones obtained earlier by the k-nearest neighbor (KNN) algorithm. From the conducted experiments, both the bagged regression tree and bagged model tree produce better results than not only their corresponding regression tree and model tree alone, but also the KNN with optimal value of k equal to 7. In addition, the bagged model tree yields the lowest prediction errors and a highest correlation coefficient of 0.81. It is demonstrated that it is feasible to use the bagged model tree for engineering applications in prediction problems such as estimating the remaining service life of bridge decks. KW - Hochschulbildung KW - Entscheidungsunterstützung KW - Brückenbau KW - Korrosion KW - Prognose Y1 - 2004 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:gbv:wim2-20111215-1982 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Haapalainen, Päivi A1 - Naaranoja, Marja A1 - Lonka, Heikki T1 - How to Prevent Project Knowledge Management Failures in Construction - IT Enabled Communication Perspective N2 - This article discusses how the failures of construction projects could be prevented. The focus is on using IT tools in communication. The article is based on the findings of the PROLABproject. The project seeks to find solutions for how the information can effectively be used in project management, specially in construction projects, what kind of procedures help the management of the knowledge and how the obstacles for efficient ways of administrating the information can be removed. These obstacles can be either related to use of new technology or to organization culture. The paper discusses e-mail as a medium of communication with the media richness framework (Fulk & Boyd 1991) based on the interviews done with the participants of construction projects. We found out that the emails were used in both rich way and not so rich way. Obstacles of rich use of IT communication were partly technical and partly psychological. Technology acceptance model (TAM) is used to study the actual use of emails in communication. Obstacles of the use of emails were mostly individual differences like the skills to use the system or external variables like they did not have proper software to open the attachments. Also people talked about information overload. Emails often push too much information. Keywords: IT tools, Communication, Knowledge management, Construction KW - Hochschulbildung KW - Entscheidungsunterstützung KW - Wissensmanagement KW - Konstruktionsfehler Y1 - 2004 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:gbv:wim2-20111215-1977 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Flood, Ian A1 - Issa, Raja A1 - Abu-Shdid, Caesar T1 - Developments in Hyper Real-Time Simulation of Transient Heat-Flow in Buildings N2 - This paper reports on the latest results in the development of a new approach for simulating the thermal behavior of buildings that overcomes the limitations of conventional heat-transfer simulation methods such as FDM and FEM. The proposed technique uses a coarse-grain approach to model development whereby each element represents a complete building component such as a wall, internal space, or floor. The thermal behavior of each coarse-grain element is captured using empirical modeling techniques such as artificial neural networks (ANNs). The main advantages of the approach compared to conventional simulation methods are: (a) simplified model construction for the end-user; (b) simplified model reconfiguration; (c) significantly faster simulation runs (orders of magnitude faster for two and three-dimensional models); and (d) potentially more accurate results. The paper demonstrates the viability of the approach through a number of experiments with a model of a composite wall. The approach is shown to be able to sustain highly accurate longterm simulation runs, if the coarse-grain modeling elements are implemented as ANNs. In contrast, an implementation of the coarse-grain elements using a linear model is shown to function inaccurately and erratically. The paper concludes with an identification of on-going work and future areas for development of the technique. KW - Hochschulbildung KW - Entscheidungsunterstützung KW - Echtzeitverarbeitung KW - Konvektion Y1 - 2004 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:gbv:wim2-20111215-1961 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Fruchter, Renate A1 - Saxena, Kushagra A1 - Breidenthal, Matt T1 - Collaborative Exploration of Rich Content in Support of Knowledge Re-use N2 - A/E/C Team members, while collaborating on building projects, rely on past experiences and content through the use of project design archives (whether in paper or digital format). This leads to underutilization of potential knowledge, as decision-making of data, information, and knowledge reuse is limited by access to these archives, due to sheer size and inconvenient presentation. This paper presents an integrated solution that leverages two technologies CoMem (Corporate Memory) and iRoom (interactive Room) developed at Stanford. This addresses critical limitations, i.e., content, context, visualization and interactivity, constraining the process of collaborative exploration towards knowledge reuse and decision-making. KW - Hochschulbildung KW - Entscheidungsunterstützung KW - Wissensverarbeitung Y1 - 2004 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:gbv:wim2-20111215-1952 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Soibelman, Lucio A1 - O'Brien, William A1 - Elvin, George T1 - Collaborative Design Processes: A Class on Concurrent Collaboration in Multidisciplinary Design N2 - The rise of concurrent engineering in construction demands early team formation and constant communication throughout the project life cycle, but educational models in architecture, engineering and construction have been slow to adjust to this shift in project organization. Most students in these fields spend the majority of their college years working on individual projects that do not build teamwork or communication skills. Collaborative Design Processes (CDP) is a capstone design course where students from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Florida learn methods of collaborative design enhanced by the use of information technology. Students work in multidisciplinary teams to collaborate from remote locations via the Internet on the design of a facility. An innovation of this course compared to previous efforts is that students also develop process designs for the integration of technology into the work of multidisciplinary design teams. The course thus combines both active and reflective learning about collaborative design and methods. The course is designed to provide students the experience, tools, and methods needed to improve design processes and better integrate the use of technology into AEC industry work practices. This paper describes the goals, outcomes and significance of this new, interdisciplinary course for distributed AEC education. Differences from existing efforts and lessons learned to promote collaborative practices are discussed. Principal conclusions are that the course presents effective pedagogy to promote collaborative design methods, but faces challenges in both technology and in traditional intra-disciplinary training of students. KW - Hochschulbildung KW - Entscheidungsunterstützung KW - Computer Supported Cooperative Work Y1 - 2004 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:gbv:wim2-20111215-1948 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Fruchter, Renate A1 - Demian, Peter A1 - Saxena, Kushagra T1 - Discovery of Re-usable Architecture/Engineering Construction Knowledge Trough Exploration of a Corporate Memory : Chance Discovery of Reusable AEC Knowledge from a Corporate Memory N2 - Re-using knowledge in architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) firms can lead to greater competitive advantage, improved designs, and more effective management of constructed facilities. This paper discusses the importance of exploration and discovery of reusable knowledge from a corporate archive as opposed to simple search and retrieval. We describe and illustrate through a scenario of use an exploration framework and prototype, CoMemTM that formalizes the added value of exploration in the process of knowledge reuse. We discuss two exploration activities: (i) Breadth- Only overview exploration that assist a user to rapidly localize pockets of re-usable knowledge from the large corporate archive and (ii) Iterative breadth-depth exploration that enables a user to identify those re-usable components of the Corporate Memory that may yield design issues that were not originally considered. KW - Hochschulbildung KW - Entscheidungsunterstützung KW - Wissensverarbeitung Y1 - 2004 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:gbv:wim2-20111215-1932 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Lau, Gloria A1 - Law, Kincho T1 - An Information Infrastructure for Comparing Accessibility Regulations and Related Information from Multiple Sources N2 - This paper describes a research project that addresses the difficulties in dealing with regulatory documents such as national and regional codes. These documents tend to be voluminous, heavily cross-referenced, possibly ambiguous and even conflicting at times. There are often multiple documents that need to be consulted and satisfied; however it is a difficult task to locate all of the relevant provisions. In addition, sections dealing with the same or similar conceptual ideas sometimes lay down conflicting requirements. We propose a framework for regulation representation, analysis and comparison with emphasis on the extraction of similarities between provisions. We focus on accessibility regulations, whose intent is to provide the same or equivalent access to a building and its facilities for disabled persons. An XML regulatory repository is developed to extract structural as well as non-structural features from government regulations to help user understanding and computational analysis. A similarity analysis is performed between different sources of regulations. In order to achieve a better comparison between provisions, we employ a combination of feature matching and structural analysis. Results are shown on comparisons between American and European codes, as well as on the domain of electronic-rulemaking. KW - Hochschulbildung KW - Entscheidungsunterstützung KW - Wissensmanagement KW - Standardisierung KW - Behinderte Y1 - 2004 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:gbv:wim2-20111215-1922 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Fruchter, Renate A1 - Chao, Yunn Chyi T1 - AEC Global Teamwork: Emergent Work Processes N2 - This ethnographic study reports on emerging work processes and practices observed in the AEC (Architecture/Engineering/Construction) Global Teamwork program, i.e., what people experience when interacting with and through collaboration technologies, why people practice in the way they do, how the practice fits into the environment and changes the work patterns. It presents the experience of two high-performance typical but extreme AEC teamwork cases adopting and adapting to collaboration technologies and how these technologies in practice impact their work processes. The findings illustrate the importance of collaboration technologies in cross-disciplinary, global teamwork. Observations indicate that high performance teams that use the collaboration technologies effectively exhibit collaboration readiness at an early stage and manage to define a “third way” to meet the demands of the cross-disciplinary, multi cultural and geographically distributed AEC workspace. The observations and implications represent the blueprint for yearly innovations and improvements to the design of the AEC Global Teamwork program. KW - Hochschulbildung KW - Entscheidungsunterstützung KW - Computer Supported Cooperative Work Y1 - 2004 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:gbv:wim2-20111215-1912 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Cheng, Jinxing A1 - Lau, Gloria A1 - Law, Kincho T1 - A simulation access language and framework for project management applications N2 - As computer programs become ever more complex, software development has shifted from focusing on programming towards focusing on integration. This paper describes a simulation access language (SimAL) that can be used to access and compose software applications over the Internet. Specifically, the framework is developed for the integration of tools for project management applications. The infrastructure allows users to specify and to use existing heterogeneous tools (e.g., Microsoft Project, Microsoft Excel, Primavera Project Planner, and AutoCAD) for simulation of project scenarios. This paper describes the components of the SimAL language and the implementation efforts required in the development of the SimAL framework. An illustration example bringing on-line weather forecasting service for project scheduling and management applications is provided to demonstrate the use of the simulation language and the infrastructure framework. KW - Hochschulbildung KW - Entscheidungsunterstützung KW - Projektmanagement Y1 - 2004 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:gbv:wim2-20111215-1567 ER -