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- 2004 (123) (remove)
There are many construction projects in China and mass documents are exchanged among the multi-party, including the owner, the contractor and the engineer in the projects. Based on previous studies, an approach to the utilization of the exchanged documents is established by using data warehouse technology and a prototype system called EXPLYZER is developed. The approach and the prototype system are verified through their application in a construction project. It is concluded that the approach can support the decision-making in project management.
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.
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.
The paper gives a general overview and concerns with a specified set of computer-aided analysis modules for hybrid structures loaded by extreme excitations. All problems are solved by methods of linear, quadratic or nonlinear mathematical optimization, that leads to very effective and economic design solutions. All approaches are derived from general optimization problem that can be easily altered to conform to specific design tasks. Some advantages and possibilities of hybrid structural modeling (single or mixed model-supported) are discussed. The methods will be illustrated by an example structure and optimization schemes.
All construction project are constrained by their schedules, budgets and specifications, and safety and environmental regulations. These constraints made construction management more complex and difficult. At the same time, many historical data that can support the decisions in the future are kept in construction enterprises,. To use the historical data effectively and efficiently, it is essential to apply the data warehouse and data mining technologies. This paper introduces a research which aims to develop a data warehouse system according to the requirements of construction enterprises and use data mining technology to learn useful information and knowledge from the data warehouse system. The design, the development and the application of this system are detailedly introduced in this paper.
To support research in the building sector and in order to help it move towards a new digital economy, the European Commission under the 5th Framework initiative, especially the IST programme, funded various RTD projects. The opportunity to bring these IST projects together was acknowledged so that stronger links can be created under a clustering umbrella and that, moreover, links of those projects with their RTD environment could be facilitated. This has been the objective of work carried out within the ICCI (IST-2001-33022) Cluster project. This paper introduces the main aims and objectives of the project, and then presents its principal outcomes. In a second part, it synthesises the underlying concepts, technology and tools that will make ICT-based Construction a reality in a near future, and gives recommended actions for the industry, the EC and the Construction ICT R&D in Europe, giving some benefit of this project experience to the three communities.
Beside the standard calculation programs for civil engineering buildings mathematical programs have been lately established for the solution of differential equations for the analysis of mechanical and static systems. Programs like Maple, Matlab, MathCAD and Mathematica are popular in this field. To the knowledge of the authors, the widest application functionality offers the program Maple. Its advantages are, e.g. the alternatively symbolic or numerical solution of differential equation systems, the easy handling of parameter studies, the immediate visualization of results, the definition of macros for selected calculation steps and their export in other computer languages and, not least, the automatically generated, very clear documentation of the matehematical calculus.
Collaboration in AEC Design : Web-enabling Applications using Peer-to-Peer Office Communicator
(2004)
A market analysis conducted by Gartner Dataquest in August 2001 has shown the typical characteristics of the AEC design process. High volatility in membership of AEC design groups and members dispersed over several external offices is the common collaboration scenario. Membership is most times short lived, compared to the overall duration of the process. A technical solution has to take that into account by making joining and leaving a collaborative work group very easy. The modelling of roles of collaboration between group members must be based on a commonly understood principle like the publisher / subscriber model, where the individual that is responsible for the distribution of vital information is clear. Security issues and trust in the confidentiality of the system is a central concern for the acceptance of the system. Therefore, keeping the subset of data that will be published under the absolute control of the publisher is a must. This is not the case with server-based scenarios, sometimes even due to psychological reasons. A loosely bound Peer-to-Peer network offers advantages over a server-based solution, because of less administrative overhead and simple installation procedures. In a peer-to-peer environment, a publish/subscribe role model can be more easily implemented. The publish/subscribe model matches the way AEC processes are modelled in real world scenarios today, where legal proof of information exchange between external offices is of high importance. Workflow management systems for small to midsize companies of the AEC industry may adopt the peer-to-peer approach to collaboration in the future. Further investigations are being made on the research level (WINDS) by integrating the viewer and redlining application Collaborate! into a collaborative environment.
The construction industry is a project-based business bringing together many different organisations to complete a desired goal. The strategic use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has enabled this goal to be completed more effectively. Two issues require addressing, the technology itself and the implementation factors of the technology. Such implementation factors should consider, among other factors, the legal and contractual issues associated with the use of ICT, training requirements and its effects on the organisational culture. To date the legal and contractual issues have not been extensively covered, and it is recognised that the technologies have not been properly covered by any recognised legal and contractual practices. This in turn is threatening to inhibit the growth and prosperity of the use of the technology on construction projects. This paper discusses these legal and contractual issues and describes methods and tools that can be used to enable the growth of technology to be used in a legal and contractually valid environment.
Collaborative Design Processes: A Class on Concurrent Collaboration in Multidisciplinary Design
(2004)
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.