Der Entwurf einfacher Konstruktionen stellt für den Tragwerksplaner zumeist eine Routineaufgabe dar. Üblicherweise werden Statik, Zeichnungen sowie Elementelisten separat voneinander erstellt. Das Programmsystem ICAD bietet die Möglichkeit, diese Arbeiten in einer Bearbeitungsstufe durchzuführen. Die Programmierung der Bemessung, Darstellung und Auswertung von Bauteilen wird mit dem Editor Emacs vorgenommen, die grafische Umsetzung des compilierten Quelltextes erfolgt im ICAD-Browser. Innerhalb dieser Benutzeroberfläche steht eine Reihe von Werkzeugen für die Eingabe und Visualisierung von Daten zur Verfügung. Betrachtet man die zu bearbeitenden Bauteile und Anschlüsse als bekannte Konstruktionen des Ingenieurholzbaus, für die es eine festgelegte Anzahl von Abmessungen und Kennwerten gibt, so läßt sich jede dieser Konstruktionen als eigenständiger Modul programmieren. Der Tragwerksplaner ist somit in der Lage, aus einem Katalog an Bauteilen und Anschlüssen die Gesamtkonstruktion zusammenzustellen. Allgemeingültige Kennwerte, Berechnungsverfahren und häufig verwendete Unterprogramme stehen modular als Wissensbasis zur Verfügung und werden von den einzelnen Tragelementen bedarfsgerecht eingebunden. Eine weitere Möglichkeit der wissensbasierten Tragwerksplanung stellt die sogenannte Multi-Criteria-Analyse dar. Bei diesem Verfahren nimmt das Programm selbständig eine Entscheidungsfindung für eine oder mehrere günstige Konstruktionslösungen vor. Dazu sind lediglich Wichtungen verschiedener Randbedingungen durch den Anwender erforderlich.
Die technische Entwicklung, insbesondere auf dem Gebiet der Digitaltechnik eröffnet heute neue und sehr weitreichende Möglichkeiten für die Automatisierung in Zweck- und Wohnbauten. Die zur Verfügung stehenden technischen Komponenten (intelligente Sensoren und Aktoren sowie ein hausinternes Netz für die Datenübertragung -Feldbus-) unterscheiden sich für diese Einsatzfälle kaum. Die Zielstellungen sind jedoch gänzlich andere. Intelligenz im Wohnbau bedeutet vor allem intelligente Alltagsbewältigung (z.B. Zeiteinsparung), Komfort und Wohlbefinden. Daß im Heimbereich nichtfunktionale Faktoren (Human Interface, Ästhetik, Preis, Attraktivität) eine große Rolle spielen, ist in das Problembewußtsein der Gerätehersteller und Käufer getreten. Im Bereich der Heimautomatisierung werden zunehmend moderne, die Möglichkeiten der konventioellen Steuerungs- und Regelungstechnik ergänzende Technologien wie Fuzzy- Steuerungen zur Optimierung der internen Arbeitsweise von Geräten eingesetzt. Die informatorische Vernetzung im Wohnbau unterstützt darüberhinaus wichtige Anliegen des Gebäudemanagements (energetische, ergonomische und ökologische Betrachtungen der Gebäudenutzung unter wirtschaftlichen Gesichtspunkten).
Bei der Kopplung unterschiedlicher Bussysteme oder der Anbindung von Geräten an externe Netzwerke (z.B. an das Internet) stellt sich oft heraus, dass für diesen Anwendungszweck grundlegende Sicherheitsmechanismen fehlen. Durch intelligente Zusatzkomponenten, z.B. Residential Gateways, können bestehende Netzwerke erfolgreich miteinander gekoppelt werden, auch wenn sie sehr unterschiedliche Eigenschaften aufweisen. Die erforderlichen Anpassungen, Dienstekonversionen und Protokollumsetzungen können in die Gateways integriert werden, so dass gewohnte Betriebsarten, besonders bei der Konfiguration oder der Diagnose, beibehalten werden können. Bei der Nutzung vorhandener Hausbus-Infrastrukturen für sicherheitsrelevante Zusatzfunktionen wie Zugangskontrollen, Zeiterfassungen oder Alarmanlagen hingegen stellt dieser Ansatz keine Lösung dar, da hier die Sicherheit innerhalb des Systems erhöht werden muss. Daher wird für solche sicherheitsrelevanten Anwendungen oft eine separate Kommunikationsinfrastruktur verwendet, obwohl ein Gebäudebus, z.B. ein EIB-System, zur Verfügung steht. Eine praktikable Lösung stellt hierbei die Verwendung der Standard-Übertragungsmechanismen des EIB dar, bei denen jedoch die eigentlichen Nettodaten verschlüsselt werden. Auf diese Weise kann normaler Datenverkehr mit gesichertem Datenverkehr gemischt werden, wobei natürlich die sicherheitsrelevanten Teilnehmer erweiterte Funktionalitäten wie Ver- und Entschlüsselung aufweisen müssen. Dem Residential Gateway kommt in solchen Systemen neben der Kopplung der internen Netzwerke und deren Anbindung an das Internet auch das intelligente Management der Schlüssel zu. ...
This paper presents an application of dynamic decision making under uncertainty in planning and estimating underground construction. The application of the proposed methodology is illustrated by its application to an actual tunneling project—The Hanging Lake Tunnel Project in Colorado, USA. To encompass the typical risks in underground construction, tunneling decisions are structured as a risk-sensitive Markov decision process that reflects the decision process faced by a contractor in each tunneling round. This decision process consists of five basic components: (1) decision stages (locations), (2) system states (ground classes and tunneling methods), (3) alternatives (tunneling methods), (4) ground class transition probabilities, and (5) tunneling cost structure. The paper also presents concepts related to risk preference that are necessary to model the contractor’s risk attitude, including the lottery concept, utility theory, and the delta property. The optimality equation is formulated, the model components are defined, and the model is solved by stochastic dynamic programming. The main results are the optimal construction plans and risk-adjusted project costs, both of which reflect the dynamics of subsurface construction, the uncertainty about geologic variability as a function of available information, and the contractor’s risk preference.
Recently, many reseraches on active control systems of building structures are preformed based on modern control theory and are installed real buildings. The authors have already proposed intelligent fuzzy optimal active control (IFOAC) systems. IFOAC systems imitate intelligent activities of human brains such as prediction, adaptation, decision-kaking and so on. In IFOAC systems, objective and subjective judgements on the active control can be taken into account. However, IFOAC systems are considered to be suitable for far-field erathquake and control effect becomes small in case of near-field earthqaukes which include a few velosity pules with large amplitudes. To improve control effect in case of near-souece earthquakes, the authors have also proposed hybrid control (HC) systems, in which IFOAC systems and fuzzy control system are combined. In HC systems, the fuzzy control systems are introduced as a reflective fuzzy active control (RFAC) system and imitates spinal reflection of human. In HC systems, active control forces are activated to buildings in accordance with switching rules on active control forces. In this paper, optimizations on fuzzy control rules in RFAC system and switching rules of active control forces in HC system are performed by Parameter-Free Genetic Algorithms (PfGAs). Here, the optimization is performed by using different earthquake inputs. The results of digital simulations show that the HC system can reduce maximal response displacements under restrictions on strokes of the actuator effectively in case of a near-source earthquake and the effectiveness of the proposed HC system is discussed and clarified.
The processes in the life cycle of buildings are characterised by highly distinct teamwork. The integration of all the distributed working participants, by providing an environment, which especially supports the communication and collaboration between the actors, is a fundamental step to improve the efficiency of the involved processes and to reduce the total costs. In this article, a link based modelling approach and its “intelligent” link management is introduced (1). This approach realises an integration environment based on a special building model that acts as a decision support system. The link-based modelling is characterised by the definition and specialisation of links between partial models. These intelligent managed links enable a very flexible and task specific data access and exchange between all the different views and partial models of the participants.
In this research project we intend to transfer the whole AEC-Bidding process to an agent-based virtual marketplace. Hereby, the existing legal regulations have to be considered. Important aspects in developing the virtual marketplace are to provide the possibility to realize an agentbased bidding consortium as well as to integrate subcontractors.
Integrated structural engineering system usually consists of large number of design objects that may be distributed across different platforms. These design objects need to communicate data and information among each other. For efficient communication among design objects a common communication protocol need to be defined. This paper presents the elements of a communication protocol that uses a mediator agent to facilitate communication among design objects. This protocol is termed the Mediative Communication Protocol (MCP). The protocol uses certain design communication performatives and the semantics of an Agent Communication language (ACL) mainly the Knowledge and Query Manipulation Language (KQML) to implement its steps. Details of a Mediator Agent, that will facilitate the communication among design objects, is presented. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is used to present the Meditative protocol and show how the mediator agent can be use to execute the steps of the meditative communication protocol. An example from structural engineering application is presented to demonstrate and validate the protocol. It is concluded that the meditative protocol is a viable protocol to facilitate object-to-object communication and also has potential to facilitate communication among the different project participants at the higher level of integrated structural engineering systems.
This paper presents results of a study on distributed, or parallel, evolutionary computation in the topological design of steel structural systems in tall buildings. It describes results of extensive experimental research on various parallel evolutionary architectures applied to a complex structural design problem. The experiments were conducted using Inventor 2003, a networkbased evolutionary design support tool developed at George Mason University. First, a general introduction to evolutionary computation is provided with an emphasis on recent developments in parallel evolutionary architectures. Next, a discussion of conceptual design of steel structural systems in tall buildings is presented. Further, Inventor 2003 is briefly introduced as well as its design representation and evolutionary computation characteristics. Next, the results obtained from systematic design experiments conducted with Inventor 2003 are discussed. The objective of these experiments was to qualitatively and quantitatively investigate evolution of steel structural systems in tall buildings during a distributed evolutionary design process as well as to compare efficiency and effectiveness of various parallel evolutionary architectures with the traditional evolutionary design approaches. Two connectivity topologies (ring topology and fully-connected topology) have been investigated for four populations of structural designs evolving in parallel and using various migration strategies. Also, results of the initial sensitivity studies are reported in which two ways of initializing distributed evolutionary design processes were investigated, using either arbitrarily selected designs as initial parents or randomly generated ones. Finally, initial research conclusions are presented.
Change management has been the focus of different IT systems. These IT systems were developed to represent design information, record design rationale, facilitate design coordination and changes. They are largely based on managing reactive changes, particularly design changes, in which changes are recorded and then propagated to the relevant project members. However, proactive changes are hardly dealt with in IT systems. Proactive changes require estimating the likelihood of occurrence of a change event as well as estimating the degree of change impacts on project parameters. Changes in construction projects often result from the uncertainty associated with the imprecise and vague knowledge of much project information at the early stages of projects. This is a major outcome of the case studies carried out as part of this research. Therefore, the proposed model considers that incomplete knowledge and certain project characteristics are always behind change causes. For proactive changes, predicting a change event is the main task for modelling. The prediction model should strive to integrate these main elements: 1) project characteristics that lead to change 2) causes of change, 3) the likelihood of change occurrence, and 4) the change consequences. It should also define the dependency relationships between these elements. However, limited data (documented) are only available from previous projects for change cases and many of the above elements can only be expressed in linguistic terms. This means that the model will simulate the uncertainty and subjectivity associated with these sets of elements. Therefore, a fuzzy model is proposed in this research to capture these elements. The model analyses the impact of each set of elements on the other by assigning fuzzy values for these elements that express the uncertainty and subjectivity of their impact. The main aim is to predict change events and evaluate change effects on project parameters. The fuzzy model described above was developed in an IT system for operational purposes and was designed as a Java package of components with their supporting classes, beans, and files. This paper describes the development and the architecture of the proposed IT system to achieve these requirements. The system is intended to help project teams in dealing with change causes and then the change consequences in construction projects.