TY - CHAP A1 - Menzel, Karsten A1 - Garrett, James H. A1 - Mahdavi, A. A1 - Ries, R. T1 - Processing "fuzzy" materials sets for environmental impact analysis of buildings N2 - Processing technical and environmental data on building materials, components, and systems has become more important during the last few years. Increased sensitivity towards environmental and energy problems has lead to the demand for simulation and evaluation of the long term behavior of buildings. The results of such simulations are expected to enable architects and engineers to develop a broader, interdisciplinary understanding of the impact of their products (buildings) on the environment. However, conducting such evaluations is currently hampered by the lack of comprehensive, up-to-date, and ecologically relevant data on building materials, components, and systems. To address this problem, this paper proposes an approach to deal with the absent or uncertain attributes of building materials, components, and systems. In the past, various information systems have been developed to provide data on a limited set of building materials, including precise values pertaining to some of their characteristics, such as availability, manufacturers, costs, etc. These traditional information systems have difficulty in dealing with uncertain, incomplete and sparse data. However, uncertainty and incompleteness characterize the nature of most of the available and environmentally related characteristics of materials, components, and systems. In this paper, a fuzzy-logic-based augmentation of traditional information systems is proposed towards providing management, utilization and manipulation of incomplete and uncertain data. KW - Bauwerk KW - Umweltfaktor KW - CAD KW - Fuzzy-Logik Y1 - 1997 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:gbv:wim2-20111215-4500 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Menzel, Karsten A1 - Mahdavi, A. A1 - Hartkopf, V. A1 - Lee, S. T1 - Information technology for construction management and building performance evaluation support - a North-American perspective N2 - We provide a critical overview of the current status of computational support for construction the management and building performance evaluation in North-America. This overview is based on the research conducted in relation to the design and construction of the Intelligent Workplace (IW), Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. With regard to the commercial software products in the field of construction management the following limitations can be identified: Although project planning, cost estimating and construction simulation are supported, tasks like bidding as well as site and material management have not received the same level of attention. Few project management software packages are integrated in a total design support software system. Little analysis or evaluation options are provided to support managerial decision making. Various research groups address the construction planning and scheduling, construction contracting, site layout generation as well as the integration of these three topics. Currently problems such as efficient material management and calculation of environmental and energy responsive site management are insufficiently addressed within the ongoing research projects. In the domain of building performance simulation and decision support one can notice that, the development and application of computational tools is industry driven. As a result the concerns addressed by the tools are mainly issues pertaining to the selection and sizing of systems and components rather than an integrated performance evaluation. Consequently, these programs are rarely used by building designers, especially in the early design stages, where the predictive capabilities of simulation tools could be of significant value. Although many research institutions address the necessity for the integration of performance simulation within the overall design support environments most of the practically available performance simulation tools still remain mono-dimensional and isolated. KW - Bauausführung KW - Computerunterstütztes Verfahren KW - Bauzustand Y1 - 1997 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:gbv:wim2-20111215-4917 ER -