Refine
Document Type
- Conference Proceeding (23) (remove)
Institute
- Professur Informatik im Bauwesen (23) (remove)
Keywords
- Bauwerk (23) (remove)
Year of publication
- 2004 (23) (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.
At the start of the conceptual design process, designers start to give tangible form to their thoughts by sketching. This helps with reasoning and communicates ideas to other members of the team. Sketches are gradually worked up into more formal drawings which are then passed to the other stages of the design process. There are however some problems with basing early ideas on sketching. For example, due to their ad-hoc nature, sketches tend only to be diagrammatic representations and so designers cannot be sure that their ideas are feasible and what is being proposed meets the constraints described in the client brief. This can result in designers wasting time working up ideas which prove to be unsuitable. Also the process of constraint checking is complex and time consuming and so designers tend limit their search of possible options and instead choose satisfying rather than good solutions. This paper describes the INTEGRA project which examines the role of sketching in early conceptual design and how this can be linked to other aspects of the process and particularly automated constraint checking using an IT based approach. The focus for the work is the design of framed buildings. A multi-disciplinary approach has been adopted and the work has been undertaken in close collaboration with practising designers and clients.
The evolution of data exchange and integration standards within the Architectural, Engineering and Construction industry is gradually making the long-held vision of computer-integratedconstruction a reality. The Industry Foundations Classes and CIMSteel Integration Standards are two such standards that have seen remarkable successes over the past few years. Despite successes, these standards support the exchange of product data more than they do process data, especially those processes that are loosely coupled with product models. This paper reports on on-going research to evaluate the adequacy of the IFC and CIS/2 standards to support process modeling in the steel supply chain. Some initial recommendations are made regarding enhancements to the data standards to better support processes.
The paper describes further developments of the interactive evolutionary design concept relating to the emergence of mutually inclusive regions of high performance design solutions. These solutions are generated from cluster-oriented genetic algorithm (COGAs) output and relate to a number of objectives introduced during the preliminary design of military airframes. The data-mining of multi-objective COGA (moCOGA) output further defines these regions through the application of clustering algorithms, data reduction and variable attribute relevance analyses. A number of visual representations of the COGA output projected onto both variable and objective space are presented. The multi-objective output of the COGA is compared to output from a Strength Pareto Evolutionary Algorithm (SPEA-II) to illustrate the manner in which moCOGAs can generate good approximations to Pareto frontiers.
The problem of data interoperability is now very important. The formal description of construction systems and objects must base upon the modeling for the description of construction data domain. The XML-language was selected as a basis of a universal data format, ensuring natural hierarchy of objects, flexibility, good layout and expandability. The language, developed by the author, is called Building Object Description Extensible Markup Language (bodXML). The types of all objects used by data transfer should be definite beforehand with existing methods of programming. It limits the possibilities of IT in application of new types. But the recipient software must recognize the building objects even if the kind of object is unknown at the outset. The author offers a set of main topological and geometric properties being sufficient for recognition of main three-dimensional building constructions with flat edges. The tests of artificial neuron network have shown that the recognition of a kind of the constructions represented as a set of indicated parameters happens enough confidently.
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.
During the establishing of fundamentals in a building project a huge amount of influence factors and boundary conditions have to be investigated in order to provide the prerequisites for further planning processes. These investigative tasks are often related with a great effort concerning time and money, because there are no standardized workflows and interfaces which provide an efficient access to the necessary information related to a specific construction site. Within the fundamental investigation human and natural circumstances have to be taken into account. Thus, in this project two examples have been chosen in order to demonstrate the holistic approach for an integration and provision of georeferenced information. The developed internet-site http://www.grundlagenermittlung.de has been designed to support architects and civil engineers in early planning phases of a building project efficiently. It offers web-based services based on dynamic interfaces for a flexible search and collection of information concerning the building site. Therefore, a central Metadatabase-Server for Description, Discovery and Integration has been established which enables a registration of georeferenced services and the redirection of incoming requests to other, distributed data pools. Using this Yellow-Page concept in combination with the underlying meta-data based on the ISO 19115 standard an efficient investigation of geographical and environmental information becomes possible.
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. ...
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.
Business and engineering knowledge in AEC/FM is captured mainly implicitly in project and corporate document repositories. Even with the increasing integration of model-based systems with project information spaces, a large percentage of the information exchange will further on rely on isolated and rather poorly structured text documents. In this paper we propose an approach enabling the use of product model data as a primary source of engineering knowledge to support information externalisation from relevant construction documents, to provide for domain-specific information retrieval, and to help in re-organising and re-contextualising documents in accordance to the user’s discipline-specific tasks and information needs. Suggested is a retrieval and mining framework combining methods for analysing text documents, filtering product models and reasoning on Bayesian networks to explicitly represent the content of text repositories in personalisable semantic content networks. We describe the proposed basic network that can be realised on short-term using minimal product model information as well as various extensions towards a full-fledged added value integration of document-based and model-based information.
The increased implementation of site data capture technologies invariably results in an increase in data warehousing and database technologies to store captured data. However, restricted use of data beyond the initial application could potentially result in a loss of understanding of site processes. This could in turn lead to poor decision making at production, tactical and strategic levels. Concrete usage data have been collected from two piling processes. These data have been analysed and the results highlighted potential improvements that could be made to existing site management and estimating processes. A cost benefit analysis has been used to support decision making at the strategic level where the identified improvements require capital expenditure.
In this contribution the software design and implementation of an analysis server for the computation of failure probabilities in structural engineering is presented. The structures considered are described in terms of an equivalent Finite Element model, the stochastic properties, like e.g. the scatter of the material behavior or the incoming load, are represented using suitable random variables. Within the software framework, a Client-Server-Architecture has been implemented, employing the middleware CORBA for the communication between the distributed modules. The analysis server offers the possibility to compute failure probabilities for stochastically defined structures. Therefore, several different approximation (FORM, SORM) and simulation methods (Monte Carlo Simulation and Importance Sampling) have been implemented. This paper closes in showing several examples computed on the analysis server.
Information science researchers and developers have spent many years addressing the problem of retrieving the exact information needed and using it for analysis purposes. In informationseeking dialogues, the user, i.e. construction project manager or supplier, often asks questions about specific aspects of the tasks they want to perform. But most of the time it is difficult for the software systems to unambiguously understand their overall intentions. The existence of information tunnels (Tannenbaum 2002) aggravates this phenomenon. This study includes a detailed case study of the material management process in the construction industry. Based on this case study, the structure of a formal user model for information retrieval in construction management is proposed. This prototype user model will be incorporated into the system design for construction information management and retrieval. This information retrieval system is a user-centered product based on the development of a user configurable visitor mechanism for managing and retrieving project information without worrying too much about the underlying data structure of the database system. An executable UML model combined with OODB is used to reduce the ambiguity in the user's intentions and to achieve user satisfaction.