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Some key facts about the economic environment of construction industry are explained. It is shown that construction industry is very heterogeneous and has changed drastically during the recent years due to a rapidly moving commercial environment. Two examples of todays’s use of virtual construction tools in construction projects are presented. The first example is the document control for a large international project. The second is the application of 4D modelling in the preconstruction phase of a dam project. It is shown that virtual construction, is a major international trend that currently takes up speed. Some generic industry needs for Research and Development which aims at short and medium term results are presented.
The management of resources is an essential task in each construction company. Today, ERP systems and e-Business systems are available to assist construction companies to efficiently organise the allocation of their personnel and equipment within the company, but they cannot provide the company with the idle resources for every single task that has to be performed during a construction project. Therefore, companies should have an alternative solution to better exploit expensive resources and compensate their fixed costs, but also have them available at the right time for their own business activities. This paper outlines the approach taken by the EU funded project “e-Sharing” (IST-2001-33325) to support resource management between construction companies. It will describe requirements for the management of construction resources, its core features, and the integration approach. Therefore, we will outline the approach of an integrated resource type model supporting the management and classification of construction equipment, construction tasks and qualification profiles. The development is based on a cross-domain analysis and evaluation of existing models. ...
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.
This paper introduces the current development of electronic catalogues of construction products. The common system architecture of Web-based electronic products catalogues are discussed, followed by a discussion on construction products information standardization and latest distributed-systems technologies for communicating construction products information. Finally, this paper presents an implementation of Web service in e-commerce systems to enable sharing of construction products information.
Cost and Schedule Controlling in Relation to Liquidity Management during Construction Projects
(2004)
The present paper describes a software application which can be used for relating the scheduled events of a construction project with the respective financial parameters, leading to an overall improvement in general controlling and liquidity management. For this purpose, existing construction schedules are taken and details of the assignment are recorded. Thus it becomes possible to assess a future payment status should changes in the designated schedule occur.
The planning of projects in building engineering is a complex process which is characterized by a dynamical composition and many modifications during the definition and execution time of processes. For a computer-aided and network-based cooperation a formal description of the planning process is necessary. In the research project “Relational Process Modelling in Cooperative Building Planning” a process model is described by three parts: an organizational structure with participants, a building structure with states and a process structure with activities. This research project is part of the priority program 1103 “Network-Based Cooperative Planning Processes in Structural Engineering” promoted by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Planning processes in civil engineering can be described by workflow graphs. The process structure describes the logical planning process and can be formally defined by a bipartite graph. This structure consists of activities, transitions and relationships between activities and transitions. In order to minimize errors at execution time of a planning process a consistent and structurally correct process model must be guaranteed. This contribution considers the concept and the algorithms for checking the consistency and the correctness of the process structure.
How does it come to particular structure formations in the cities and which strengths play a role in this process? On which elements can the phenomena be reduced to find the respective combination rules? How do general principles have to be formulated to be able to describe the urban processes so that different structural qualities can be produced? With the aid of mathematic methods, models based on four basic levels are generated in the computer, through which the connections between the elements and the rules of their interaction can be examined. Conclusions on the function of developing processes and the further urban origin can be derived.
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.
PKPM series CAD software is an integrated CAD system for building design, which integrated the following parts: architectural design, structural design, building service design and statistic analysis of quantity and budget. These four parts share the same database with high efficiency. Over 80% of design corporation in China are using PKPM series CAD software. The detailed information and some key modules of PKPM series CAD software are mainly introduced in this paper.
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.
A vast growth of advanced information technology systems and tools nowadays is opening new ways to collect accurate as-built data. Since the turn of the millennium, new technology developments enable for the first time to gather accurate as-built information. Accurate as-built data will be of great usage to construction management as well as to designers and engineers. Given that most of the planned data are already digitally available, as-built data remains on paper forms. Information technology developments are opening new ways to digitize construction field data in order to develop intelligent tools for construction management allowing design engineers to update as-planned data. 3D Laser scanning, digital close-range photogrammetry and mobile computing are among the promising data collection technologies, which are auspicious to create new opportunities to develop advanced construction management and engineering tools. Primarily, accurate collected as-built data will be highly beneficial for the process of updating as-planned data.
Advances in construction data analysis techniques have provided useful tools to discover explicit knowledge on historical databases supporting project managers’ decision making. However, in many situations, historical data are extracted and preprocessed for knowledge discovery based on time-consuming and problem-specific data preparation solutions, which often results in inefficiencies and inconsistencies. To overcome the problem, we are working on the development of a new data fusion methodology, which is designed to provide timely and consistent access to historical data for efficient and effective management knowledge discovery. The methodology is intended to be a new bridge between historical databases and data analysis techniques, which shields project managers from complex data preparation solutions, and enables them to use discovered knowledge for decision making more conveniently. This paper briefly describes the motivation, the background and the initial results of the ongoing research.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The AEC industry is conscious of the potentials arising from the usage of mobile computer systems to increase productivity by streamlining their business processes. Discussions are no longer on whether or not to use a mobile computer solution, but rather, on how it should be used. However, the implantation process of this new technology in Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) and Facility Management (FM) practise is very slow and should be improved. One way to encourage and ease the usage of mobile computer systems in AEC is a more process-oriented usability and context appropriateness of mobile computer solutions. Context-sensitivity is defined as a crucial feature to be taken into account for further research in the area of Mobile Computing. Context-sensitive, mobile IT-solutions depend on two features: (1) flexible definitions of (construction) processes describing the context and (2) tools for flexible, multi-dimensional information management representing the context. It is on this premise that the authors propose the n-dimensional data management approach for the implementation of mobile computing solutions. In this paper, we analyse working scenarios in the AEC and FM sector, defining context aspects which are transformed and formalized as dimension hierarchies of the envisaged context model.
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.
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).
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.
This paper describes the concept, implementation and application of the Web-based Information System ‘Turtle’ for data monitoring, analysis, reporting and management in engineering projects. The system uses a generalised object-oriented approach for information modelling of physical state variables from measurements and simulations by sets of tensor objects and is implemented platform-independently as a Web application. This leads to a more flexible handling of measurement and simulation information in distributed and interdisciplinary engineering projects based on the concept of information sharing. The potential and advantages of Web-based information systems like ‘Turtle’ are described for one selected application example: a measurement programme dealing with the physical limnology of Lake Constance.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Integrated Engineering Workflow focused on the Structural Engineering in the Industrial Environment
(2004)
The engineering and construction industry has been slow to exploit the full potential of information technology. The industry is highly fragmented, price sensitive, risk-adverse, and profit margins are small. Each project is unique with a small amount of technological innovation opportunities to capitalise on from one project to the next. Technological innovations that have been taking place are just simulating the old traditional paper workflow. Engineering information in digital form is being conveyed using traditional paper representations, which have to be interpreted by humans before the information can be used in other applications, thereby creating ‘islands of information’. It can be seen that poorly implemented IT strategies are duplicating paperwork, rather than reducing or eliminating it (Crowley et al., 2000). This paper will introduce the Integrated Engineering Workflow (IEW) concept to re-organise a structural discipline working on multi-disciplinary projects so as to maximise the advantages offered by new information technology.
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.
Let the information of a civil engineering application be decomposed into objects of a given set of classes. Then the set of objects forms the data base of the application. The objects contain attributes and methods. Properties of the objects are stored in the attributes. Algorithms which the objects perform are implemented in the methods of the objects. If objects are modified by a user, the consistency of data in the base is destroyed. The data base must be modified in an update to restore its consistency. The sequence of the update operations is not arbitrary, but is governed by dependence between the objects. The situation can be described mathematically with graph theory. The available algorithms for the determination of the update sequence are not suitable when the data base is large. A new update algorithm for large data bases has been developed and is presented in this paper.
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. ..
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.
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.
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. ...
Der Architektenvertrag als Werkvertrag (Konsequenzen: Haftung für den Werkerfolg, keine abschließende Bestimmung des vom Architekten geschuldeten Leistungsumfanges durch den Tätigkeitskatalog etwa von § 15 HOAI), vertragliche und außervertragliche Haftungstatbestände (vertragliche Ansprüche des Auftraggebers gegen den Architekten, Haftung gegenüber Dritten aufgrund des Architektenvertrages), typische Haftungsrisiken des Architekten, insbesondere im Kostenbereich sowie für Planungs- und Objektüberwachungsfehler (Haftung des Architekten für Überschreitung der Baukosten, Architektenhaftung bei Planungs- und Objektüberwachungsfehlern), Zulässigkeit der Vereinbarung von Haftungsbeschränkungen, Berufshaftpflichtversicherung für Architekten und Ingenieure
Voraussetzungen einer ordnungsgemäßen Ausschreibung, Beachtung des Vergaberechtssystems, Vergaberecht bei Privatisierungen, Abgrenzung zwischen VOL- und VOF-Verfahren, ordnungsgemäße Schwellenwertermittlung, Finanzierung und Planung, richtige Vergabeart, richtige Leistungs- und Aufgabenbeschreibung, ordnungsgemäße Wertung, Aufhebung der Ausschreibung, ordnungsgemäßer Vergabevermerk
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.
Site superintendents performing project management tasks on construction sites need to access project documents and need to collect information that they observe while inspecting the site. Often, information that is observed on a construction site needs to be integrated into electronic documents or project control systems. In the future, we expect integrated product and process models to be the medium for storing and handling construction project management information. Even though mobile computing devices today are already capable of storing and handling such integrated product and process data models, the user interaction with such large and complex models is difficult and not adequately addressed in the existing research. In this paper, we introduce a system that supports project management tasks on construction sites effectively and efficiently by making integrated product and process models accessible. In order to effectively and efficiently enter or access information, site superintendents need visual representations of the project data that are flexible with respect to the level of detail, the decomposition structure, and the type of visual representation. Based on this understanding of the information and data collection needs, we developed the navigational model framework and the application Site Data Collection System (SiDaCoS), which implements that framework. The navigational model framework allows site superintendents to create customized representations of information contained in a product and process model that correspond to their data access and data collection needs on site.
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.
This paper focuses on a new three-level discretisation strategy which enables the transition between continuum/structural (I) and structural/black box modelling (II). The transition (I) is realised by means of a model adaptive concept based on an innovative finite element technology. For transition (II) we apply the truncated balanced realisation method (TBR). The latter represents an established system theoretical model reduction technique which is here combined with a novel substructure technique. The approach provides a modular concept to facilitate the computational analysis of complex structures. The final goal is to apply the strategy to life time estimation.
This paper presents a generic methodology for measurement system configuration when the goal is to identify behaviour models that reasonably explain observations. For such tasks, the best measurement system provides maximum separation between candidate models. In this work, the degree of separation between models is measured using Shannon’s Entropy Function. The location and type of measurement devices are chosen such that the entropy of candidate models is greatest. This methodology is tested on a laboratory structure and, to demonstrate generality, an existing fresh water supply network in a city in Switzerland. In both cases, the methodology suggests an appropriate set of sensors for identifying the state of the system.
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.
As a result of the pilot-project “Grundwasser-Online” the supervision and the active controlling of large monitoring- and catchment-areas are realised by a co-operative integration of all related institutions, a synchronisation-process to combine all distributed data into one central server database, and a high-level eGovernment-Service to provide evaluated information over the internet. Based on this software system the local authorities are able to supervise the groundwater-levels and to find adequate decisions, which finally result in official permissions for the usage of groundwater-reservoirs by the water supply companies.
The growing competition pressure in the building industry increases the demands on the design and construction processes in respect to economical, technical and time aspects. These demands require efficient improvements of the value-added chain, which can be realized mainly with the usage of innovative information- and communication-technologies. To support the collaboration of all participants involved in a certain building project the Workflow-Management-System “BauKom-Online” has been developed. In the focus of the system is to support the coordination of the participants and their information exchange. Such a software-method is well suited to ensure a high quality planning process. The modelling of business-processes enables a better self-comprehension of the participants work and helps to enhance the project performance. The system architecture of BauKom-Online contains two basic components: the processmodelling tool and the workflow-engine. The process-model contains of activities and states of the planning and construction processes and their relations. These connected processes compose the workflow. Such a process-model for engineering purposes has to satisfy several needs, e.g., the consideration of planning and building alternatives, dynamic changes of the model during execution of the project and the linkage to further technical objects like costs, building structure, specifications and documentmanagement. Furthermore, the scheduling of the project can be done within the process-model and can be visualized as a Gantt-diagram. ...
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.
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.
Recent research shows that current learning strategies in construction industry have not been effective in implementing lean principles in construction. With that in mind the researchers set to investigate an alternative learning strategy in order to promote learning at the international level. A web-based environment, was developed for this project with the intent of promoting learning and knowledge exchange on the theory and practice of "process transparency" across different countries.
Information and Communication Technologies (ITC) in education have been extensively discussed nowadays. In this e-learning scenario, the construction and use of environments that support teaching and learning is a reality. Therefore, for time and general resource savings it is crucial the access to hypermedia contents with great interactivity and with high reusability. Substantial efforts have been centered in the search for a metadata proposal (metadata is a generic term used to describe data that can be used to identify and to describe common characteristics among different documents) that can be standardized and is system independent for the so called learning objects.
The contribution describes the didactical integration of wireless access networks for the campus of the University of Karlsruhe in the education of architects and engineers. It focuses on the development of an interdisciplinary communication network to encourage and promote the communication and collaboration between students. The project assumes that significant learning progresses in net-based learning scenarios are based upon the synchronous and asynchronous cooperation between the students themselves. The remote cooperation across borders of disciplines makes high demands on capacity in communicating and cooperating of the involved persons as well as on the supporting tools. Therefore, the collective acquisition of knowledge and cooperation has to be trained intensively during the studies. Based on the design and project oriented cooperation platform netzentwurf.de the authors developed the tools “Jobadmin“ to administrate multidisciplinary workgroups, the “Swarm Knowledge Catalogue“ to collect and store knowledge and “LivingCampus“, an instrument providing basic services for dynamic communication.