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- 2004 (177) (remove)
This paper presents a new design environment based on Multi-Agents and Virtual Reality (VR). In this research, a design system with a virtual reality function was developed. The virtual world was realized by using GL4Java, liquid crystal shutter glasses, sensor systems, etc. And the Multi-Agent CAD system with product models, which had been developed before, was integrated with the VR design system. A prototype system was developed for highway steel plate girder bridges, and was applied to a design problem. The application verified the effectiveness of the developed system.
A Multi-objective Model for Optimizing Construction Planning of Repetitive Infrastructure Projects
(2004)
This paper presents the development of a model for optimizing resource utilization in repetitive infrastructure projects. The model provides the capability of simultaneous minimization of both project duration and work interruptions for construction crews. The model provides in a single run, a set of nondominated solutions that represent the tradeoff between these two objectives. The model incorporates a multiobjective genetic algorithm and scheduling algorithm. The model initially generates a randomly selected set of solutions that evolves to a near optimal set of tradeoff solutions in subsequent generations. Each solution represents a unique scheduling solution that is associated with certain project duration and a number of interruption days for utilized construction crews. As such, the model provides project planners with alternative schedules along with their expected duration and resource utilization efficiency.
A comprehensive framework of information management system for construction projects in China has been established through extensive literature survey and field investigation. It utilizes the potential information technologies and covers the practical management patterns as well as the major aspects of construction project management. It can be used to guide and evaluate the design of the information management systems for construction projects in order to make the system to be applicable to a wide variety of construction projects and survive the changes in project management.
The Priority Programme ‘Network Based Co-operation in Structural Engineering’ of the ‘German Research Foundation’ (DFG) has been established in the year 2000. This paper describes and discusses the main research directions and first results of the workgroup ‘Distributed Product Models’. The five projects of the workgroup have developed completely different solutions for specific application domains. Each solution concept deals with a consistent product modeling and knowledge processing in a distributed environment in the planning process. The individual solution approaches of the projects are described and the underlying basic assumptions are discussed. A unified system architecture is described for all projects of the workgroup. Two different approaches (object-oriented and graph-based models) have been introduced for product and knowledge modeling. The common structure of these models will be explained to fully understand the differences of these modeling approaches. Finally the concepts for co-operative work and conflict management in a distributed environment are described: The solution approaches will be distinguished by classifying the supported co-operation according to time. A final scientific summary describes the state-of-the-art in network based co-operation in structural engineering: The role of research directions like knowledge modeling, standard product modeling and versioning in the distributed planning process will be explained.
Today’s building industry not only demands more and more reduced construction time on building site, but also an advanced and mostly construction attendant design phase. Even though there is software available to support design processes in distributed environments, most applications only support simple document based exchange of information. In this paper a knowledge based system is presented to support cooperative, comprehensive design processes in distributed environments. The presented research project is financially supported by the German Research Community (DFG – Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft).
In our project, we develop new tools for the conceptual design phase. During conceptual design, the coarse functionality and organization of a building is more important than a detailed worked out construction. We identify two roles, first the knowledge engineer who is responsible for knowledge definition and maintenance; second the architect who elaborates the conceptual design. The tool for the knowledge engineer is based on graph technology, it is specified using PROGRES and the UPGRADE framework. The tools for the architect are integrated to the industrial CAD tool ArchiCAD. Consistency between knowledge and conceptual design is ensured by the constraint checker, another extension to ArchiCAD.
Current disaster management procedures rely primarily on heuristics which result in their strategies being very cautious and sub-optimum in terms of saving life, minimising damage and returning the building to its normal function. Also effective disaster management demands decentralized, dynamic, flexible, short term and across domain resource sharing, which is not well supported by existing distributing computing infrastructres. The paper proposes a conceptual framework for emergency management in the built environment, using Semantic Grid as an integrating platform for different technologies. The framework supports a distributed network of specialists in built environment, including structural engineers, building technologists, decision analysts etc. It brings together the necessary technology threads, including the Semantic Web (to provide a framework for shared definitions of terms, resources and relationships), Web Services (to provide dynamic discovery and integration) and Grid Computing (for enhanced computational power, high speed access, collaboration and security control) to support rapid formation of virtual teams for disaster management. The proposed framework also make an extensive use of modelling and simulation (both numerical and using visualisations), data mining (to find resources in legacy data sets) and visualisation. It also include a variety of hardware instruments with access to real time data. Furthermore the whole framework is centred on collaborative working by the virtual team. Although focus of this paper is on disaster management, many aspects of the discussed Grid and Visualisation technologies will be useful for any other forms of collaboration. Conclusions are drawn about the possible future impact on the built environment.
Many problems related to data integration in AEC can be better tackled by an approach that takes into account the heterogeneity of tasks, models and applications but does not require continuous consistency of the evolving design data, at each data management operation. Such an approach must incorporate adequate services that can facilitate reintegration of concurrently modified data at reasonably selected coordination points. In this paper we present a set of methods which, used in combination, can achieve that goal. After a description of the principal envisaged cooperative work scenario each of these methods is discussed in detail and current observations drawn from their software realisation are given. Whilst the suggested approach is valid for any EXPRESS-based data model, the practical focus of work has been on facilitating IFC-driven integration.
An architecture of a distributed planning system for the building industry has been developed. The emphasis is on highly collaborative environments in steelwork, timber construction etc. where designers concurrently handle 3D models. The overall system connects local design systems by the so-called Design Framework DFW. This framework consists of the definition of distributed components and protocols which make the collaborative design work. The process of collaborative design has been formalized on an abstract level. This paper describes how this has been done. A sample is given to illustrate the mapping of concrete scenarios of the ‘real design world’ to an abstract scenario level. This work is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG as part of the project SPP1103 (Meißner et al. 2003).
The paper summarizes a part of research carried out in ICCI project and provides a current review of ICT infrastructures supporting collaboration. It covers taxonomies, protocols, standards, components, typical subsystems as well as future trends and recommendation for two most important technologies with applications in AEC: (1) EIP (Enterprise information portal) – a single gateway to a company's information, knowledge base, and applications for all actors; (2) RTC (Real-Time Communication and Collaboration technologies) that provide means for asynchronous communication between geographically dislocated people using ICT. Proposed future developments are: orientation towards web services - with building information models, business intelligence, personalization, AEC information retrieval, p2p workspaces and grids.
The synchronous distributed processing of common source code in the software development process is supported by well proven methods. The planning process has similarities with the software development process. However, there are no consistent and similarly successful methods for applications in construction projects. A new approach is proposed in this contribution.
Efforts to define standards for representing AEC/FM data have been fairly successful. However defining a standard reference process model has not met with the same success. Yet almost every conceptual modelling or software development project starts by defining the business processes to be supported and the related requirements to be satisfied. This paper describes a new process-centred methodology for user requirements capture developed in the ICCI project (IST-2001-33022). Its essence is in recognising user requirements and use cases in the context of the real construction process, identifying the actors and roles for each individual activity and associating these activities with information, communication and standardisation requirements on the basis of a formalised specification, named the Process Matrix. In the paper we outline the history of process matrix development, introduce the basic structure of the matrix and show how it can be further extended and refined. We present also a web-based software implementation of the developed approach, describe how it has been used in ICCI and outline further perspectives.
Organisational and human issues have been highlighted, among other issues (ICT infrastructures, legal and contractual, etc.), as key elements in enhancing the competitiveness of the construction sector. More specifically, the importance of human resources has been recognised, especially training and professional development, in order to cultivate a stable workforce. The paper provides a review of the key training needs for the construction sector with particular reference to the uptake and exploitation of new technologies and working practices, presents an action plan to address learning and training needs, and proposes an eight-stage iterative learning and training methodology. The results will be of particular interest to managers in stakeholder organisations of all sizes throughout the sector, plus academic and research bodies intending to continue construction ICT research.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.