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The contribution introduces a method for the distributed process modelling in order to support the process orientation in Structural Engineering, i.e., the modelling, analysis and management of planning processes. The approach is based on the Petri Net theory for the modelling of planning processes and workflows in Structural Engineering. Firstly, a central and coarse process model serves as a pre-structuring system for the detailed modelling of the technical planning activities. Secondly, the involved planning participants generate distributed process models with detailed technical workflow information. Finally, these distributed process models will be combined in the central workflow net. The final net is of great importance for the process orientation in Structural Engineering, i.e., the identification, publication, analysis, optimization and finally the management of planning processes.
Construction is a conservative industry that over the last twenty ye ars has experienced drastic changes in the way that interdisciplinary teams interact to design and execute a project. In this article we offer a general overview of how the main participants cooperate in the different phases of a construction project, and which are some of the main areas for communication improvement. We also explore the communication tools used in the exchange of information, and identify the main causes of information breakdown. The general framework of this study is of application to both standard and green projects. At the end of the article we discuss the peculiarities of green buildings. Our goal is to offer a series of industry insights derived from the perspective of a general contractor aimed at identifying the areas where contributions in computing and information exchange could have a greater impact on the successful completion of a project.
Three-dimensional models of urban objects play an important role in the urban applications such as urban planning, environmental concerning, or urban disaster mitigations. While the modeling of urban objects is time consuming and storage costing. This paper presents solutions for this. Buildings with regular shapes and plane roofs are constructed into computer models by identifying of graphic elements from the digital maps of urban area to get building base plane and building heights. Buildings with irregular shapes and non-plane roofs are constructed into computer models by employment of a specific system developed by the authors. Road objects and topologies are constructed into computer models by employment of specific algorithms. The solutions presented in this paper has been used in the development of urban disaster mitigation system for Shantou, China.
For planning in existing built contexts, the building survey is the starting point for initial planning proposals, for the diagnosis and documentation of building damages, for the creation of objectives catalogues, for the detailed design of renovation and conversion measures and for ensuring fulfilment of building legislation, particularly by change of use and refitting. An examination of currently available IT-tools shows insufficient support for planning within existing contexts, most notably a deficit with regard to information capture and administration. This paper discusses the concept for a modular surveying system (basic concept, separation of geometry from semantic data, and separation into sub-systems) and the prototypical realisation of a system for the complete support of the entire building surveying process for existing buildings. The project aims to contribute to the development of a planning system for existing buildings. ...
Building activities in the construction industry in Germany increasingly concentrate on building measures in or involving the existing built environment. Before planning can begin, buildings must be surveyed in whole or in part with the surveying of geometric data playing a dominant role. The geometric survey is typically undertaken using geodetic or photogrammetric measuring techniques and equipment that have been adapted for use in building surveying. Accordingly appropriate technical knowledge is required in order to be able to operate them as well as a considerable financial investment. Such equipment and surveying methods are usually adaptations from other disciplines. The paper discusses and presents approaches to developing “new” equipment for building surveying, devised with the needs of building surveying in mind – redesigns or new designs for surveying tools. The designs are the result of an inter-disciplinary project between the Faculty of Architecture and the Faculty of Product Design at the Bauhaus Universität Weimar.
The increasing demands in building and civil engineering – with regard to the growing amount of legal requirements and the needs of a flexible usage of the building - requires an optimisation of all processes during the planning and construction phases. This aim can be only reached by transferring of innovative information and communication technologies in the field of cooperation of all partners in a building project. In this article the enhancement of the existing planning processes based on an improved information management is introduced. Since the late 90ies the availability of hardware and software infrastructures for a networkbased cooperation, e.g. email, in small and middle-sized companies increased the problems of an unstructured communication in the planning and construction processes. These problems have not been solved by the usage of the upcoming project communication systems either, which are often used as a simple medium for data transfer. Because of the easy way of distributing documents to all planning partners a huge amount of files and subsequent versions can be stored so that the planners often have to scope with an information overflow. The underlying hierarchical structures based on simple files stored in tree views are not sufficient for an adequate representation of the different specific views of the planners and the management of relationships between the three information domains building structure, costs and time schedules. ..
This paper describes an Internet-enabled software model that could facilitate the development and utilization of nonlinear structural analysis programs. The software model allows users easy access to the analysis core program and the analysis results by using a web-browser or other application programs. In addition, new and legacy codes can be incorporated as distributed services and be integrated with the software framework from disparate sites. A distributed project management system, taking advantages of Internet and database technologies, is implemented to store and manage model information and simulation results. Nonlinear dynamic analysis and simulations of a bridge structure is performed to illustrate the facilities of the Internet-enabled software model.
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.
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.
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 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.
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).
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 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.
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 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.
Most retaining walls and box culverts built for arterial road construction are simple, and the design process of these structures is often repetitive and labor-intensive because they are so similar in structural configuration. Although some integrated design automation systems developed for retaining walls and box culverts have expedited the design process of these structures, the process of collecting and distributing the resultant engineering documents has not been fully integrated with the computer applications. We have been developing a Web-based design automation system to manage the resultant documents as well as to speed up the repetitive design process. Manipulation of engineering drawings in the Web page is one of the critical functions needed for Web-based design automation. eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and XML-based vector graphics are expected to facilitate the representation of engineering drawings in the Web page. In this paper, we present how we used XML and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) to compose engineering drawings and represent them in the Web page. XML Data Island we designed to define drawing components turned out effective in manipulating the engineering drawings in the Web page.
The construction industry is a supportive industry in China. IT (information technolgy), including computer technology and communication technology, as a whole is regarded as the most important means to upgrade the construction industry so that research projects were organized by Chinese government to further the application of IT in the construction industry. This study originated from one of the projects and is aimed at grasping the general situation on the application of IT in the construction industry. A questionnaire was designed for the survey, which used stratified proportional sampling method, and was carried out under the help of a government agency. This study can not only provide sound foundation for the government to make relative policies, but also reveal references for the firms in construction industry to apply IT in their business. This paper presents the preliminary result of the survey.
The uniqueness and the long life cycle of buildings imply a dynamically modifiable building model. The technological foundation for the management of digital building models, a dynamic model management system (MMS), developed by our research group, allows to explicitly access and to modify the object model of the stored planning data. In this paper, the integration of constraints in digital building models will be shown. Constraints are conditions, which apply to the instances of domain model classes, and are defined by the user at runtime of the information system. For the expression of constraints, the Constraint Modelling Language (CML) has been developed and will be described in this paper. CML is a powerful, intuitively usable object-oriented language, which allows the expression of constraints at a high semantic level. A constrained-enabled MMS can verify, whether an instance fulfils the applying constraints. To ensure flexibility, the evaluation of constraints is not implicitly performed by the systems, but explicitly initiated by the user. A classification of constraint types and example usage scenarios are given.