In recent years, the survey is performed for repair, such as a bridge and a building built in past, spending great expense. And it is anxious for the survey technique that doesn’t need cost and time more. Then, we made an idea of the technique of precise 3D model creation by 2D pictures. However, the technique of performing the improvement in accuracy of convergent photographing and automatic acquisition of corresponding points was not established. Therefore, in this research, we try to obtain a semi-automation of corresponding points acquisition from initial corresponding points and the improvement in accuracy of convergent photographing. Moreover, we applied the research to the used house of Japanese real estate, and the applicable field was selected as the high needs of the residence of 3D model. And we developed the system that everyone could create Web / 3D model house by VRML easily without requiring expensive apparatuses or expertise.
Although there are some good reasons to design engineering software as a stand-alone application for a single computer, there are also numerous possibilities for creating distributed engineering applications, in particular using the Internet. This paper presents some typical scenarios how engineering applications can benefit from including network capabilities. Also, some examples of Internet-based engineering applications are discussed to show how the concepts presented can be implemented.
In this contribution, the design of an analysis environment is presented, that supports an analyst to come to a decision within a gradual collaborative planning process. An analyst represents a project manager, planner or any other person, involved in the planning process. Today, planning processes are managed by several geographically distributed planners and project managers. Thus, complexity of such a process rises even more. Prediction of consequences of many planning decisions is not possible, in particular since assessment of a planning advance is not trivial. There have to be considered several viewpoints, that depend on individual perceptions. In the following, methods are presented to realize planning decision support.
Building design in Civil Engineering is characterized by the cooperation of experts in multiple disciplines. Close cooperation of engineers in different fields is the basis of high product quality, short development periods and a minimum of investment costs. For each building the engineers have to create a new fire engineering model. The consistent realization of the fire engineering model in all details has high demands on communication, collaboration and building models. Thereby, to preserve the related design models consistent to each other and compatible with the rules of fire engineering is a complex task. In addition, regulations and guidelines vary according to the building location, so the knowledge base must be integrated dynamically into the planning process. This contribution covers the integration of engineers and design models into a cooperation network on the basis of mobile agents. The distributed models of architectural design, structural planning and fire engineering are supported. These models are implemented as XML-based models which can be accessed by mobile agents for information retrieval and for processing tasks. Agents are provided to all planners, they are enabled to check up the distributed design models with the knowledge base of the fire protection regulations,. With the use of such an agent each planner is supported to check up his planning for accordance with the fire protection requirements. The fire-engineering-agent analyzes the design and detects inconsistencies by processing fire protection requirements and design model facts in a rule-based expert system. The possibility to check the planning information at an early state in the sense of compatibility to the fire protection regulations enables a comprehensive diagnosis of the design and the reduction of planning errors.
In the AEC (Architecture / Engineering / Construction) industry a number of individuals and organisations collaborate and work jointly on a construction project. The resulting consortium has large pool of expertise and experience and can be defined as a Virtual Organisation (VO) formed for the duration of the project. VOs are electronically networked organisations where IT and web based communication technology play an important role in coordinating various activities of these organisations. This paper describes the design, development and implementation of a Grid enabled application called the Product Supplier Catalogue Database (PSCD) which supports collaborative working in consortia. As part of the Grid-enabling process, specialised metadata is being developed to enable PSCD to effectively utilise Grid middleware such as Globus and Java CoG toolkits. We also describe our experience whilst designing, developing and deploying the security service of the application using the Globus Security Interface (GSI).
This paper describes the concept and experiences of the international Open Distance Learning Course ‘HydroWeb’. This course deals with the introduction of Web-based Collaborative Engineering in standard education programmes of water related engineering and civil engineering based on information sharing. Organized under the umbrella of IAHR and ETNET21 this course is collaboration from several universities from all over the world. Started in 1999 the course demonstrates the potential and innovative opportunities of Web-Technology in education, research and engineering: Students from the different partner universities form small distributed teams to solve a given engineering problem in a time window of two weeks. To overcome the spatial distribution the students apply modern Web technology such as video conferencing, application sharing and document management. All results as well as the final reports are presented as Web document on a shared Web-based project platform (http://www.hydro-web.org). Besides the experiences to apply standard Web tools and working methods based on information sharing instead the conventional information exchange in the daily engineering work the students improve their soft skills operate successfully in international and interdisciplinary project environments as part of the ‘Technical Culture’ of nowadays.
Assuring global consistency in a cooperative working environment is the main focus of many nowaday research projects in the field of civil engineering and others. In this paper, a new approach based on octrees will be discussed. It will be shown that by the usage of octrees not only the management and control of processes in a network-based working environment can be optimised but also an efficient integration platform for processes from various disciplines – such as architecture and civil engineering – can be provided. By means of an octree-based collision detection resp. consistency assurance a client-server-architecture will be described as well as sophisticated information services for a further support of cooperative work.
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.
The conceptual structure of an application that can support the structural analysis task in a distributed collaboratory is described in (van Rooyen and Olivier 2004). The application described there has a standalone component for executing the finite element method on a local workstation in the absence of network access. This application is comparable to current, local workstation based finite element packages. However, it differs fundamentally from standard packages since the application itself, and its objects, are adapted to support distributed execution of the analysis task. Basic aspects of an object-oriented framework for the development of applications which can be used in similar distributed collaboratories are described in this paper. An important feature of this framework is its application-centred design. This means that an application can contain any number of engineering models, where the models are formed by the collection of objects according to semantic views within the application. This is achieved through very flexible classes Application and Model, which are described in detail. The advantages of the application-centred design approach is demonstrated with reference to the design of steel structures, where the finite element analysis model, member design model and connection design model interact to provide the required functionality.