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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).
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.
The contribution introduces an adaptable process model to meet the special requirements of the coordination of planning activities in AEC (Architecture, Engineering, Construction). The process model is based on the concept of Coloured Petri-Nets and uses metainformation to characterize process-relevant information and to enable process-control based on the actual results of the planning.
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.
This paper will present a number of technical aspects for one of the most elaborate instrumentation and data acquisition projects ever undertaken in Canada. Confederation Bridge, the longest bridge built over ice covered seawater has been equipped with the state of the art data acquistition devices and systems as well as data transfer networks. The Bridge has been providing a fixed surface connection between Prince Edward Island and Province of New Brunswick in Canada since its opening in 1997. The Bridge has a rather long design service life of 100 years. Because of its large size and long span length, its design is not covered by any existing codes or standards worldwide. The focus of the paper is to introduce the data acquisition, transfer, processing and management systems. The instrumentation and communications infrastructure and devices will be presented in some details along with the data processing and management systems and techniques. Teams of engineers and researchers use the collected data to verify the analysis and design assumptions and parameters as well as investigate the short-term and long-term behaviour and health of the Bridge. The collected data are also used in furthering research activities in the field of bridge engineering and in elevating our knowledge about behaviour, reliability and durability of such complex structures, their components and materials.
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.
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.
Many construction and facilities management Web sites can be found on the Internet. The interested parties on construction and facilities management Web sites can find databases of best practices, calculators, analyzers, software, expert and decision support systems, neural networks, etc. Technological innovation mainly through changes in the availability of information and communication technology inclusive databases of best practices, calculators, analyzers, software, neural networks, decision support and expert systems that have been provided by a variety of new services developed by the construction and facilities management sectors. Most of all calculators, analyzers, software, decision support and expert systems, neural networks and on-line systems seek to find out how to make the most economic decisions and most of all these decisions are intended only for economic objectives. Alternatives under evaluation have to be evaluated not only from the economic position, but take into consideration qualitative, technical, technological and other characteristics as well. Based on the analysis of the existing calculators, analyzers, information, expert and decision support systems, neural networks and in order to determine most efficient versions of best practices a Decision Support Web-Based System for Construction Innovation (IDSS) was developed by Vilnius Gediminas Technical University.
The paper investigates accuracy of deflection predictions made by the finite element package ATENA and design code methods ACI and EC2. Deflections have been calculated for a large number of experimental reinforced concrete beams reported by three investigators. Statistical parameters have been established for each of the technique at different load levels, separately for the beams with small and moderate reinforcement ratio.
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.
In the field of Civil Engineering, the content of reinforcement concrete design course (RC course) has complicated design procedures and many difficult specifications to recognize, so most of the students regard the RC course a tough course, and teachers very often find the class time insufficient. Also, teachers of the RC course usually spend a lot of time in organizing the examinations for handling tedious calculations and complicated logical reasoning. Furthermore, correcting examination papers with partial scoring takes even more time of the teacher’s. Therefore, the objective of this research is to design and develop a partial scoring assessment system to meet the needs in engineering design courses, such as the RC course. This assessment system can generate test items with variable parameters. It also supports inference diagnosis on the examinee’s misconceptions and gives partial scores in grading the examination. In this research, the example test subject is the analysis of rectangular reinforced concrete beam with single layer steel bars.
An important feature of the 2003 SARS outbreak in Canada, Singapore, and Hong Kong was that many health care workers (HCWs) developed SARS after caring for patients with SARS. This has been ascribed to inadequate or ineffective patient isolation. However, it is difficult for dense cities to provide sufficient isolation facilities within a short period of time. This has raised concerns from the public for new strategies in the planning and design of isolation facilities. Considering that SARS or other infectious diseases could seriously damage our society’s development, isolation facilities that could be rapidly and economically constructed with appropriate environmental controls are essential. For this reason, the design team of the Department of Architecture collaborated with a special task force from the Faculty of Medicine, who are the frontline medical officers treating the SARS patients, to design Rapidly Assembled Isolation Patient Wards. Both architecture and medicine are well established disciplines, but they have little in common in terms of the mode of knowledge construction and practice. This induced much intellectual exploration and research interest in conducting this study. The process has provided an important reference for cross disciplinary studies between the architectural and medical domains.
Communication software and distributed applications for control and building performance simulation software must be reliable, efficient, flexible, and reusable. This paper reports on progress of a project, which aims to achieve better integrated building and systems control modeling in building performance simulation by run-time coupling of distributed computer programs. These requirements motivate the use of the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA), which offers sufficient advantage than communication within simple abstraction. However, set up highly available applications with CORBA is hard. Neither control modeling software nor building performance environments have simple interface with CORBA objects. Therefore, this paper describes an architectural solution to distributed control and building performance software tools with CORBA objects. Then, it explains how much the developement of CORBA based distributed building control simulation applications is difficult. The paper finishes by giving some recommendations.
Development and Analysis of Sparse Matrix Concepts for Finite Element Approximation on general Cells
(2004)
In engineering and computing, the finite element approximation is one of the most well-known computational solution techniques. It is a great tool to find solutions for mechanic, fluid mechanic and ecological problems. Whoever works with the finite element method will need to solve a large system of linear equations. There are different ways to find a solution. One way is to use a matrix decomposition technique such as LU or QR. The other possibility is to use an iterative solution algorithm like Conjugate Gradients, Gauß-Seidel, Multigrid Methods, etc. This paper will focus on iterative solvers and the needed storage techniques...
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.
Change management has been the focus of different IT systems. These IT systems were developed to represent design information, record design rationale, facilitate design coordination and changes. They are largely based on managing reactive changes, particularly design changes, in which changes are recorded and then propagated to the relevant project members. However, proactive changes are hardly dealt with in IT systems. Proactive changes require estimating the likelihood of occurrence of a change event as well as estimating the degree of change impacts on project parameters. Changes in construction projects often result from the uncertainty associated with the imprecise and vague knowledge of much project information at the early stages of projects. This is a major outcome of the case studies carried out as part of this research. Therefore, the proposed model considers that incomplete knowledge and certain project characteristics are always behind change causes. For proactive changes, predicting a change event is the main task for modelling. The prediction model should strive to integrate these main elements: 1) project characteristics that lead to change 2) causes of change, 3) the likelihood of change occurrence, and 4) the change consequences. It should also define the dependency relationships between these elements. However, limited data (documented) are only available from previous projects for change cases and many of the above elements can only be expressed in linguistic terms. This means that the model will simulate the uncertainty and subjectivity associated with these sets of elements. Therefore, a fuzzy model is proposed in this research to capture these elements. The model analyses the impact of each set of elements on the other by assigning fuzzy values for these elements that express the uncertainty and subjectivity of their impact. The main aim is to predict change events and evaluate change effects on project parameters. The fuzzy model described above was developed in an IT system for operational purposes and was designed as a Java package of components with their supporting classes, beans, and files. This paper describes the development and the architecture of the proposed IT system to achieve these requirements. The system is intended to help project teams in dealing with change causes and then the change consequences in construction projects.
Digital maps are very easily applied as route guide maps. Route guide maps are provided through Web or a mobile phone services, and demand for such services is increasing. However, the production of a route guide map requires a great deal of time. Therefore, it is difficult for general users to make route guide maps. The purpose of the present research is the development of a system that can generate a route guide map using the Digital Map 2500 (Spatial Data Framework) published by the Geographical Survey Institute. This system will not require advanced equipment or expert knowledge. Therefore, anyone can produce route guide maps easily and quickly. By using the Digital Map 2500, the time and cost required in order to generate a map are reduced. Moreover, a useful route guide map can be created by simplifying the map form based on the human cognitive map.
A simulation system has been developed as a computer aided design tool to evaluate the effect of proposed design on the thermal environment during the designing process. This system calculates outdoor surface temperatures in order to evaluate the thermal impact of a design factor in outdoor space. In this study, the previous heat balance simulation system was improved to predict the surface temperature of a proposed design using 3D-CAD. This system is able to input the complicated outdoor spatial forms efficiently and also to evaluate the surface temperature distribution from any viewpoint.
Development of Urban Land Use Model to Compare Transit-Oriented and Automobile-Oriented Cities
(2004)
This study is an attempt to develop a simple simulation model that can compare the differences between automobile-oriented and transit-oriented cities, and clarify the difference between city forms by transportation modes. Following a theoretical model development, a series of simulation runs are tried. The model allocates people who commute to CBD from residential zones along a transportation corridor. As a result of many simulation analyses, it is shown that automobiles need much more traffic space in comparison with the transit as is shown by the proposed traffic space ratio both in CBD and along the corridor.
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.
Re-using knowledge in architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) firms can lead to greater competitive advantage, improved designs, and more effective management of constructed facilities. This paper discusses the importance of exploration and discovery of reusable knowledge from a corporate archive as opposed to simple search and retrieval. We describe and illustrate through a scenario of use an exploration framework and prototype, CoMemTM that formalizes the added value of exploration in the process of knowledge reuse. We discuss two exploration activities: (i) Breadth- Only overview exploration that assist a user to rapidly localize pockets of re-usable knowledge from the large corporate archive and (ii) Iterative breadth-depth exploration that enables a user to identify those re-usable components of the Corporate Memory that may yield design issues that were not originally considered.
Available construction time-cost trade-off analysis models can be used to generate trade-offs between these two important objectives, however, their application is limited in large-scale construction projects due to their impractical computational requirements. This paper presents the development of a scalable and multi-objective genetic algorithm that provides the capability of simultaneously optimizing construction time and cost large-scale construction projects. The genetic algorithm was implemented in a distributed computing environment that utilizes a recent standard for parallel and distributed programming called the message passing interface (MPI). The performance of the model is evaluated using a set of measures of performance and the results demonstrate the capability of the present model in significantly reducing the computational time required to optimize large-scale construction projects.
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.
This paper presents results of a study on distributed, or parallel, evolutionary computation in the topological design of steel structural systems in tall buildings. It describes results of extensive experimental research on various parallel evolutionary architectures applied to a complex structural design problem. The experiments were conducted using Inventor 2003, a networkbased evolutionary design support tool developed at George Mason University. First, a general introduction to evolutionary computation is provided with an emphasis on recent developments in parallel evolutionary architectures. Next, a discussion of conceptual design of steel structural systems in tall buildings is presented. Further, Inventor 2003 is briefly introduced as well as its design representation and evolutionary computation characteristics. Next, the results obtained from systematic design experiments conducted with Inventor 2003 are discussed. The objective of these experiments was to qualitatively and quantitatively investigate evolution of steel structural systems in tall buildings during a distributed evolutionary design process as well as to compare efficiency and effectiveness of various parallel evolutionary architectures with the traditional evolutionary design approaches. Two connectivity topologies (ring topology and fully-connected topology) have been investigated for four populations of structural designs evolving in parallel and using various migration strategies. Also, results of the initial sensitivity studies are reported in which two ways of initializing distributed evolutionary design processes were investigated, using either arbitrarily selected designs as initial parents or randomly generated ones. Finally, initial research conclusions are presented.
This paper presents an innovative software platform OpenSTEP intended to build advanced distributed integrated systems and to conduct multidisciplinary collaborative projects in both academy and industry. The paper discusses an open system architecture, methodology, component library and CASE toolkit enabling the developers to build a wide range of interoperable applications and systems compliant with STEP and, particularly, with IFC becoming the increasingly important standard for information integration in architecture, engineering and construction.
In this paper, systematic analyses for the shoring systems installed to support the applied loads during construction are performed on the basis of the numerical approach. On the basis of a rigorous time-dependent analysis, structural behaviors of reinforced concrete (RC) frame structures according to the changes in design variables such as the types of shoring systems, shore stiffness and shore spacing are analyzed and discussed. The time-dependent deformations of concrete such as creep and shrinkage and construction sequences of frame structures are also taken into account to minimize the structural instability and to reach to an improved design of shoring system because these effects may increase the axial forces delivered to the shores. In advance, the influence of the column shortening effect, generally mentioned in a tall building structure, is analyzed. From many parametric studies, it has been finally concluded that the most effective shoring system in RC frame structures is 2S1R (two shores and one reshore) regardless of the changes in design variables.
Integrated structural engineering system usually consists of large number of design objects that may be distributed across different platforms. These design objects need to communicate data and information among each other. For efficient communication among design objects a common communication protocol need to be defined. This paper presents the elements of a communication protocol that uses a mediator agent to facilitate communication among design objects. This protocol is termed the Mediative Communication Protocol (MCP). The protocol uses certain design communication performatives and the semantics of an Agent Communication language (ACL) mainly the Knowledge and Query Manipulation Language (KQML) to implement its steps. Details of a Mediator Agent, that will facilitate the communication among design objects, is presented. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is used to present the Meditative protocol and show how the mediator agent can be use to execute the steps of the meditative communication protocol. An example from structural engineering application is presented to demonstrate and validate the protocol. It is concluded that the meditative protocol is a viable protocol to facilitate object-to-object communication and also has potential to facilitate communication among the different project participants at the higher level of integrated structural engineering systems.
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.
The construction management has been under pressure to reduce operating costs and to improve productivity using innovative information technologe (IT) solutions conformed to structural characteristics, site conditions and past experiences. Given the growing emphasis on effectiveness and efficiency in construction projects, there is an imminent need to develop a formal procedure to select the best IT application for each proposed construction project and research and development (R&D) project. As there are numerous factors that have to be considered in selecting appropriate IT in a given situation, decision-makers need to have multicriteria decision-making ability. To enable them to make the most appropriate decision in any situation, it is important that effective tools incorporating multicriteria decision-making techniques are available. In this paper, an Analytic Network Process (ANP) model is conducted for the selection of appropriate IT application for innovative construction management prior to construction or research. The paper concludes that the ANP is a viable and capable tool for conducting IT application selection in multicriteria decision-making environment.
Current building product models explicitly represent components, attributes of components, and relationships between components. These designer-focused product models, however, do not represent many of the design conditions that are important for construction, such as component similarity, uniformity, and penetrations. Current design and construction tools offer limited support for detecting these construction-specific design conditions. This paper describes the ontology we developed using the manufacturing concept of features to represent the design conditions that are important for construction. The feature ontology provides the blueprint for the additions and changes needed to transform a standard product model into a constructionspecific product model. The ontology formalizes three classes of features, defines the attributes and functions of each feature type, and represents the relationships between features explicitly. The descriptive semantics of the ontology allows practitioners to represent their varied preferences for naming features, specifying features that result from component intersections and the similarity of components, and grouping features that affect a specific construction domain. A software prototype that implements the ontology enables practitioners to transform designer-focused product models into feature-based product models that represent the construction perspective.
The method of the finite elements is an adaptable numerical procedure for interpolation as well as for the numerical approximation of solutions of partial differential equations. The basis of these procedure is the formulation of suitable finite elements and element decompositions of the solution space. Classical finite elements are based on triangles or quadrangles in the two-dimensional space and tetrahedron or hexahedron in the threedimensional space. The use of arbitrary-dimensional convex and non-convex polyhedrons as the geometrical basis of finite elements increases the flexibility of generating finite element decompositions substantially and is sometimes the only way to get a clear decomposition...
This paper describes a couple of new truss structures based on fractal geometry. One is the famous Sierpinski Gasket and another is a fractal triangle derived by means of applying a process forming leaves of a cedar tree using M. F. Barnsley’s contraction mapping theory. Therefore a pair of x-y coordinates of an arbitrary nodal point on the structures are generated easily if IFS(Iterated Function System) codes and a scale of them are specified. Structural members are defined similarly. Thus data for frame analysis can be generated automatically, which is significant if the objective structure has complex configuration. Next analytical results under vertical and wind loadings in Japanese Building Code are shown. Here members are assumed to be timber and to have cross section of 15cm×15cm. Finally authors conclude that geometrically new truss structures were developed and automatic data generation for frame analysis was attained using IFS. Analytical results show they contribute to saving material when compared it with King-post truss.
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.
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 highway product model based on the length information of the centerline, and the application system is developed. This paper shows the schema and the modeling process of the product model, which includes geometric elements such as an alignment, lanes, sidewalks, shoulders and sprits, and accessories such as guard fences, plantings and signs. Furthermore, The Highway Sequence Editor (HSE) is developed as an application system to verify the model.
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
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.
In this research project we intend to transfer the whole AEC-Bidding process to an agent-based virtual marketplace. Hereby, the existing legal regulations have to be considered. Important aspects in developing the virtual marketplace are to provide the possibility to realize an agentbased bidding consortium as well as to integrate subcontractors.
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.
Re-examination of the behaviour of structures can be necessary due to deterioration or changes in the traffic situation during their lifetime. The Finite Element Method (FEM) is widely used in order to accomplish numerical analysis. Considering the development of computer performance, more detailed FEM models can be analyzed, even on site, with mobile computers. To compensate the increasing amount of data needed for the model input, measures need to be taken to save time, by distributing the work. In order to provide consistency to the model, fedback data must be checked upon reception. A local wireless computer network of ultra-portable devices linked together with a computer can provide the coordination necessary for efficient parallel working. Based on a digital model consisting of all data gathered, structural modelling and numerical analysis are performed automatically. Thus, the user is released from the work that can be automatized and the time needed for the overall analysis of a structure is decreased.
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.
With the speedy development of transportation of China, especially construction of many high-grade highways, some information technology successes have been achieved in the highway and bridge engineering, such as survey, design, construction and maintenance etc. In this paper, some applications about information technology in the highway engineering were introduced and some bridge professional software developed by RIOH (Research Institute Of Highways) in recent years was also introduced.
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.
Buildings require both for construction and, due to their comparatively long life cycle for maintenance, significant raw material and energy resources. So far available knowledge about resource consumption during an entire life cycle of a building is still quite rare, because various criteria affect each other and/or overlay mutually. In this contribution a model based software concept is presented using an integrated approach for life cycle simulation and assessment of buildings. The essential point of the development consists of connecting an IFC compliant product model of a building via the Internet with data bases for the resource and energy requirement of building materials. Furthermore, numerical simulations allow calculating and minimizing the energy consumption, the resource requirement, the waste streams and also the noxious emissions. In the context of this paper we present the first release of software programs for architects and engineers, which help them to evaluate their design decisions objectively in early planning steps. Additionally the usage of the software is demonstrated by a test case study for a real world building. By applying this software in practice a substantial contribution for saving energy and natural resources can be provided in the sense of sustainable and ecological building design.
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. ..
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.
This paper deals with two different agent-based approaches aimed at the incorporation of complex design information into multi-agent planning systems. The first system facilitates collaborative structural design processes, the second one supports fire engineering in buildings. Both approaches are part of two different research projects that belong to the DFG1 priority program 1103 entitled “Network-based Co-operative Planning Processes in Structural Engineering“ (DFG 2000). The two approaches provide similar database wrapper agents to integrate relevant design information into two multi-agent systems: Database wrapper agents make the relevant product model data usable for further agents in the multi-agent system, independent on their physical location. Thus, database wrapper agents act as an interface between multi-agent system and heterogeneous database systems. The communication between the database wrapper agents and other requesting agents presumes a common vocabulary: a specific database ontology that maps database related message contents into database objects. Hereby, the software-wrapping technology enables the various design experts to plug in existing database systems and data resources into a specific multi-agent system easily. As a consequence, dynamic changes in the design information of large collaborative engineering projects are adequately supported. The flexible architecture of the database wrapper agent concept is demonstrated by the integration of an XML and a relational database system.
The processes in the life cycle of buildings are characterised by highly distinct teamwork. The integration of all the distributed working participants, by providing an environment, which especially supports the communication and collaboration between the actors, is a fundamental step to improve the efficiency of the involved processes and to reduce the total costs. In this article, a link based modelling approach and its “intelligent” link management is introduced (1). This approach realises an integration environment based on a special building model that acts as a decision support system. The link-based modelling is characterised by the definition and specialisation of links between partial models. These intelligent managed links enable a very flexible and task specific data access and exchange between all the different views and partial models of the participants.
Applications for civil engineering tasks usually contain graphical user interfaces for the engineering processes. Persistent objects of the applications are stored to data bases. The influence of the interaction between a graphical user interface and a data base for the development of an civil engineering application is investigated in this paper. A graphic application for the linear elastic analysis of plane frames, which was previously developed with standard tools of the Java platform, is compared to a redesigned implementation using a generalized data base for persistent objects. The investigation leads to the following results : - A strict distinction between persistent and transient objects influences the class structure of an application, in particular the class structure of a graphical user interface. - The structure of an application depends on the logic for updating of references to persistent and transient graphical objects after an application is read from a file. - The complexity of the reference management can usually be handled better by just in time referencing associated with String - identifiers rather than by automated referencing associated with Name - identifiers.
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.