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The presented work focuses on the presentation of a discrete event simulator which can be used for automated sequencing and optimization of building processes. The sequencing is based on the commonly used component–activity–resource relations taking structural and process constraints into account. For the optimization a genetic algorithm approach was developed, implemented and successfully applied to several real life steel constructions. In this contribution we discuss the application of the discrete event simulator including its optimization capabilities on a 4D process model of a steel structure of an automobile recycling facility.
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 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.
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 goal of the research is the development of a computer system to plan, simulate and visualize erection processes in construction. In the research construction cranes are treated as robots with predefined degrees of freedom and crane-specific motion planning techniques are developed to generate time-optimized and collision-free paths for each piece to be erected in the project. Using inverse kinematics and structural dynamics simulation, the computer system then computes the crane motions and velocities necessary to achieve the previously calculated paths. The main benefits of the research are the accurate planning and scheduling of crane operations leading to optimization of crane usage and project schedules, as well as improving overall crane safety in the project. This research is aimed at the development of systems that will allow computer-assisted erection of civil infrastructure and ultimately to achieve fully-automated erection processes using robotic cranes...
Individual views on a building product of people involved in the design process imply different models for planning and calculation. In order to interpret these geometrical, topological and semantical data of a building model we identify a structural component graph, a graph of room faces, a room graph and a relational object graph as aids and we explain algorithms to derive these relations. The application of the technique presented is demonstrated by the analysis and discretization of a sample model in the scope of building energy simulation.
This paper presents an application of dynamic decision making under uncertainty in planning and estimating underground construction. The application of the proposed methodology is illustrated by its application to an actual tunneling project—The Hanging Lake Tunnel Project in Colorado, USA. To encompass the typical risks in underground construction, tunneling decisions are structured as a risk-sensitive Markov decision process that reflects the decision process faced by a contractor in each tunneling round. This decision process consists of five basic components: (1) decision stages (locations), (2) system states (ground classes and tunneling methods), (3) alternatives (tunneling methods), (4) ground class transition probabilities, and (5) tunneling cost structure. The paper also presents concepts related to risk preference that are necessary to model the contractor’s risk attitude, including the lottery concept, utility theory, and the delta property. The optimality equation is formulated, the model components are defined, and the model is solved by stochastic dynamic programming. The main results are the optimal construction plans and risk-adjusted project costs, both of which reflect the dynamics of subsurface construction, the uncertainty about geologic variability as a function of available information, and the contractor’s risk preference.
Recently, many reseraches on active control systems of building structures are preformed based on modern control theory and are installed real buildings. The authors have already proposed intelligent fuzzy optimal active control (IFOAC) systems. IFOAC systems imitate intelligent activities of human brains such as prediction, adaptation, decision-kaking and so on. In IFOAC systems, objective and subjective judgements on the active control can be taken into account. However, IFOAC systems are considered to be suitable for far-field erathquake and control effect becomes small in case of near-field earthqaukes which include a few velosity pules with large amplitudes. To improve control effect in case of near-souece earthquakes, the authors have also proposed hybrid control (HC) systems, in which IFOAC systems and fuzzy control system are combined. In HC systems, the fuzzy control systems are introduced as a reflective fuzzy active control (RFAC) system and imitates spinal reflection of human. In HC systems, active control forces are activated to buildings in accordance with switching rules on active control forces. In this paper, optimizations on fuzzy control rules in RFAC system and switching rules of active control forces in HC system are performed by Parameter-Free Genetic Algorithms (PfGAs). Here, the optimization is performed by using different earthquake inputs. The results of digital simulations show that the HC system can reduce maximal response displacements under restrictions on strokes of the actuator effectively in case of a near-source earthquake and the effectiveness of the proposed HC system is discussed and clarified.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This paper presents an agent-based software, Virtual Administrator System (VAS) for the smallscale maintenance of school buildings. VAS is capable of handling a heavy load of routine, lowtech maintenance jobs. It assigns a different priority to each job application according to its significance and urgency, and automatically adjusts schedules for maintenance engineers when on-site supervision is needed. The system can help ease off the burden of routine small-scale maintenance work, making it more cost-effective and efficient in the overall management of school building maintenance. VAS posts jobs on the Web in a multi-media format and classified all applications into four categories: the on-call maintenance contract, the term maintenance contract, the guaranty maintenance contract, and the regular maintenance contract. It then estimates their urgency level and passes the information to maintenance engineers who will decide whether on-site inspection is needed. Based on the engineers’ feedback, VAS automatically implements the scheduling for inspection as well as sends out real-time or batch notifications to contractors. All these activities are recorded in a database to allow continuous research and data mining and the analysis and diagnosis of specific jobs for followup maintenance plans.
Expert systems integrating fuzzy reasoning techniques represent a powerful tool to support practicing engineers during the early stages of structural design. In this context fuzzy models have proved themselves to be very suitable for the representation of complex design knowledge. However their definition is a laborious task. This paper introduces an approach for the design and the optimization of fuzzy systems based upon Genetic Programming. To keep the emerging fuzzy systems transparent a new framework for the definition of linguistic variables is also introduced.
This paper presents a new design environment based on Multi-Agents and Virtual Reality (VR). In this research, a design system with a virtual reality function was developed. The virtual world was realized by using GL4Java, liquid crystal shutter glasses, sensor systems, etc. And the Multi-Agent CAD system with product models, which had been developed before, was integrated with the VR design system. A prototype system was developed for highway steel plate girder bridges, and was applied to a design problem. The application verified the effectiveness of the developed system.
A Multi-objective Model for Optimizing Construction Planning of Repetitive Infrastructure Projects
(2004)
This paper presents the development of a model for optimizing resource utilization in repetitive infrastructure projects. The model provides the capability of simultaneous minimization of both project duration and work interruptions for construction crews. The model provides in a single run, a set of nondominated solutions that represent the tradeoff between these two objectives. The model incorporates a multiobjective genetic algorithm and scheduling algorithm. The model initially generates a randomly selected set of solutions that evolves to a near optimal set of tradeoff solutions in subsequent generations. Each solution represents a unique scheduling solution that is associated with certain project duration and a number of interruption days for utilized construction crews. As such, the model provides project planners with alternative schedules along with their expected duration and resource utilization efficiency.
A comprehensive framework of information management system for construction projects in China has been established through extensive literature survey and field investigation. It utilizes the potential information technologies and covers the practical management patterns as well as the major aspects of construction project management. It can be used to guide and evaluate the design of the information management systems for construction projects in order to make the system to be applicable to a wide variety of construction projects and survive the changes in project management.
The Priority Programme ‘Network Based Co-operation in Structural Engineering’ of the ‘German Research Foundation’ (DFG) has been established in the year 2000. This paper describes and discusses the main research directions and first results of the workgroup ‘Distributed Product Models’. The five projects of the workgroup have developed completely different solutions for specific application domains. Each solution concept deals with a consistent product modeling and knowledge processing in a distributed environment in the planning process. The individual solution approaches of the projects are described and the underlying basic assumptions are discussed. A unified system architecture is described for all projects of the workgroup. Two different approaches (object-oriented and graph-based models) have been introduced for product and knowledge modeling. The common structure of these models will be explained to fully understand the differences of these modeling approaches. Finally the concepts for co-operative work and conflict management in a distributed environment are described: The solution approaches will be distinguished by classifying the supported co-operation according to time. A final scientific summary describes the state-of-the-art in network based co-operation in structural engineering: The role of research directions like knowledge modeling, standard product modeling and versioning in the distributed planning process will be explained.
Today’s building industry not only demands more and more reduced construction time on building site, but also an advanced and mostly construction attendant design phase. Even though there is software available to support design processes in distributed environments, most applications only support simple document based exchange of information. In this paper a knowledge based system is presented to support cooperative, comprehensive design processes in distributed environments. The presented research project is financially supported by the German Research Community (DFG – Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft).
In our project, we develop new tools for the conceptual design phase. During conceptual design, the coarse functionality and organization of a building is more important than a detailed worked out construction. We identify two roles, first the knowledge engineer who is responsible for knowledge definition and maintenance; second the architect who elaborates the conceptual design. The tool for the knowledge engineer is based on graph technology, it is specified using PROGRES and the UPGRADE framework. The tools for the architect are integrated to the industrial CAD tool ArchiCAD. Consistency between knowledge and conceptual design is ensured by the constraint checker, another extension to ArchiCAD.
Current disaster management procedures rely primarily on heuristics which result in their strategies being very cautious and sub-optimum in terms of saving life, minimising damage and returning the building to its normal function. Also effective disaster management demands decentralized, dynamic, flexible, short term and across domain resource sharing, which is not well supported by existing distributing computing infrastructres. The paper proposes a conceptual framework for emergency management in the built environment, using Semantic Grid as an integrating platform for different technologies. The framework supports a distributed network of specialists in built environment, including structural engineers, building technologists, decision analysts etc. It brings together the necessary technology threads, including the Semantic Web (to provide a framework for shared definitions of terms, resources and relationships), Web Services (to provide dynamic discovery and integration) and Grid Computing (for enhanced computational power, high speed access, collaboration and security control) to support rapid formation of virtual teams for disaster management. The proposed framework also make an extensive use of modelling and simulation (both numerical and using visualisations), data mining (to find resources in legacy data sets) and visualisation. It also include a variety of hardware instruments with access to real time data. Furthermore the whole framework is centred on collaborative working by the virtual team. Although focus of this paper is on disaster management, many aspects of the discussed Grid and Visualisation technologies will be useful for any other forms of collaboration. Conclusions are drawn about the possible future impact on the built environment.
Many problems related to data integration in AEC can be better tackled by an approach that takes into account the heterogeneity of tasks, models and applications but does not require continuous consistency of the evolving design data, at each data management operation. Such an approach must incorporate adequate services that can facilitate reintegration of concurrently modified data at reasonably selected coordination points. In this paper we present a set of methods which, used in combination, can achieve that goal. After a description of the principal envisaged cooperative work scenario each of these methods is discussed in detail and current observations drawn from their software realisation are given. Whilst the suggested approach is valid for any EXPRESS-based data model, the practical focus of work has been on facilitating IFC-driven integration.
An architecture of a distributed planning system for the building industry has been developed. The emphasis is on highly collaborative environments in steelwork, timber construction etc. where designers concurrently handle 3D models. The overall system connects local design systems by the so-called Design Framework DFW. This framework consists of the definition of distributed components and protocols which make the collaborative design work. The process of collaborative design has been formalized on an abstract level. This paper describes how this has been done. A sample is given to illustrate the mapping of concrete scenarios of the ‘real design world’ to an abstract scenario level. This work is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG as part of the project SPP1103 (Meißner et al. 2003).
The paper summarizes a part of research carried out in ICCI project and provides a current review of ICT infrastructures supporting collaboration. It covers taxonomies, protocols, standards, components, typical subsystems as well as future trends and recommendation for two most important technologies with applications in AEC: (1) EIP (Enterprise information portal) – a single gateway to a company's information, knowledge base, and applications for all actors; (2) RTC (Real-Time Communication and Collaboration technologies) that provide means for asynchronous communication between geographically dislocated people using ICT. Proposed future developments are: orientation towards web services - with building information models, business intelligence, personalization, AEC information retrieval, p2p workspaces and grids.
The synchronous distributed processing of common source code in the software development process is supported by well proven methods. The planning process has similarities with the software development process. However, there are no consistent and similarly successful methods for applications in construction projects. A new approach is proposed in this contribution.
Efforts to define standards for representing AEC/FM data have been fairly successful. However defining a standard reference process model has not met with the same success. Yet almost every conceptual modelling or software development project starts by defining the business processes to be supported and the related requirements to be satisfied. This paper describes a new process-centred methodology for user requirements capture developed in the ICCI project (IST-2001-33022). Its essence is in recognising user requirements and use cases in the context of the real construction process, identifying the actors and roles for each individual activity and associating these activities with information, communication and standardisation requirements on the basis of a formalised specification, named the Process Matrix. In the paper we outline the history of process matrix development, introduce the basic structure of the matrix and show how it can be further extended and refined. We present also a web-based software implementation of the developed approach, describe how it has been used in ICCI and outline further perspectives.
Organisational and human issues have been highlighted, among other issues (ICT infrastructures, legal and contractual, etc.), as key elements in enhancing the competitiveness of the construction sector. More specifically, the importance of human resources has been recognised, especially training and professional development, in order to cultivate a stable workforce. The paper provides a review of the key training needs for the construction sector with particular reference to the uptake and exploitation of new technologies and working practices, presents an action plan to address learning and training needs, and proposes an eight-stage iterative learning and training methodology. The results will be of particular interest to managers in stakeholder organisations of all sizes throughout the sector, plus academic and research bodies intending to continue construction ICT research.
The construction industry is a project-based business bringing together many different organisations to complete a desired goal. The strategic use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has enabled this goal to be completed more effectively. Two issues require addressing, the technology itself and the implementation factors of the technology. Such implementation factors should consider, among other factors, the legal and contractual issues associated with the use of ICT, training requirements and its effects on the organisational culture. To date the legal and contractual issues have not been extensively covered, and it is recognised that the technologies have not been properly covered by any recognised legal and contractual practices. This in turn is threatening to inhibit the growth and prosperity of the use of the technology on construction projects. This paper discusses these legal and contractual issues and describes methods and tools that can be used to enable the growth of technology to be used in a legal and contractually valid environment.
To support research in the building sector and in order to help it move towards a new digital economy, the European Commission under the 5th Framework initiative, especially the IST programme, funded various RTD projects. The opportunity to bring these IST projects together was acknowledged so that stronger links can be created under a clustering umbrella and that, moreover, links of those projects with their RTD environment could be facilitated. This has been the objective of work carried out within the ICCI (IST-2001-33022) Cluster project. This paper introduces the main aims and objectives of the project, and then presents its principal outcomes. In a second part, it synthesises the underlying concepts, technology and tools that will make ICT-based Construction a reality in a near future, and gives recommended actions for the industry, the EC and the Construction ICT R&D in Europe, giving some benefit of this project experience to the three communities.
The research reported in this article was conducted to mainly explore the two common numeric prediction techniques, the model tree and the regression tree, when used in conjunction with bagging as a wrapper method. Bagging is used to improve the prediction accuracy of these two algorithms, and results are compared with the ones obtained earlier by the k-nearest neighbor (KNN) algorithm. From the conducted experiments, both the bagged regression tree and bagged model tree produce better results than not only their corresponding regression tree and model tree alone, but also the KNN with optimal value of k equal to 7. In addition, the bagged model tree yields the lowest prediction errors and a highest correlation coefficient of 0.81. It is demonstrated that it is feasible to use the bagged model tree for engineering applications in prediction problems such as estimating the remaining service life of bridge decks.
This article discusses how the failures of construction projects could be prevented. The focus is on using IT tools in communication. The article is based on the findings of the PROLABproject. The project seeks to find solutions for how the information can effectively be used in project management, specially in construction projects, what kind of procedures help the management of the knowledge and how the obstacles for efficient ways of administrating the information can be removed. These obstacles can be either related to use of new technology or to organization culture. The paper discusses e-mail as a medium of communication with the media richness framework (Fulk & Boyd 1991) based on the interviews done with the participants of construction projects. We found out that the emails were used in both rich way and not so rich way. Obstacles of rich use of IT communication were partly technical and partly psychological. Technology acceptance model (TAM) is used to study the actual use of emails in communication. Obstacles of the use of emails were mostly individual differences like the skills to use the system or external variables like they did not have proper software to open the attachments. Also people talked about information overload. Emails often push too much information. Keywords: IT tools, Communication, Knowledge management, Construction
This paper reports on the latest results in the development of a new approach for simulating the thermal behavior of buildings that overcomes the limitations of conventional heat-transfer simulation methods such as FDM and FEM. The proposed technique uses a coarse-grain approach to model development whereby each element represents a complete building component such as a wall, internal space, or floor. The thermal behavior of each coarse-grain element is captured using empirical modeling techniques such as artificial neural networks (ANNs). The main advantages of the approach compared to conventional simulation methods are: (a) simplified model construction for the end-user; (b) simplified model reconfiguration; (c) significantly faster simulation runs (orders of magnitude faster for two and three-dimensional models); and (d) potentially more accurate results. The paper demonstrates the viability of the approach through a number of experiments with a model of a composite wall. The approach is shown to be able to sustain highly accurate longterm simulation runs, if the coarse-grain modeling elements are implemented as ANNs. In contrast, an implementation of the coarse-grain elements using a linear model is shown to function inaccurately and erratically. The paper concludes with an identification of on-going work and future areas for development of the technique.
A/E/C Team members, while collaborating on building projects, rely on past experiences and content through the use of project design archives (whether in paper or digital format). This leads to underutilization of potential knowledge, as decision-making of data, information, and knowledge reuse is limited by access to these archives, due to sheer size and inconvenient presentation. This paper presents an integrated solution that leverages two technologies CoMem (Corporate Memory) and iRoom (interactive Room) developed at Stanford. This addresses critical limitations, i.e., content, context, visualization and interactivity, constraining the process of collaborative exploration towards knowledge reuse and decision-making.
Collaborative Design Processes: A Class on Concurrent Collaboration in Multidisciplinary Design
(2004)
The rise of concurrent engineering in construction demands early team formation and constant communication throughout the project life cycle, but educational models in architecture, engineering and construction have been slow to adjust to this shift in project organization. Most students in these fields spend the majority of their college years working on individual projects that do not build teamwork or communication skills. Collaborative Design Processes (CDP) is a capstone design course where students from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Florida learn methods of collaborative design enhanced by the use of information technology. Students work in multidisciplinary teams to collaborate from remote locations via the Internet on the design of a facility. An innovation of this course compared to previous efforts is that students also develop process designs for the integration of technology into the work of multidisciplinary design teams. The course thus combines both active and reflective learning about collaborative design and methods. The course is designed to provide students the experience, tools, and methods needed to improve design processes and better integrate the use of technology into AEC industry work practices. This paper describes the goals, outcomes and significance of this new, interdisciplinary course for distributed AEC education. Differences from existing efforts and lessons learned to promote collaborative practices are discussed. Principal conclusions are that the course presents effective pedagogy to promote collaborative design methods, but faces challenges in both technology and in traditional intra-disciplinary training of students.
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.
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.
This ethnographic study reports on emerging work processes and practices observed in the AEC (Architecture/Engineering/Construction) Global Teamwork program, i.e., what people experience when interacting with and through collaboration technologies, why people practice in the way they do, how the practice fits into the environment and changes the work patterns. It presents the experience of two high-performance typical but extreme AEC teamwork cases adopting and adapting to collaboration technologies and how these technologies in practice impact their work processes. The findings illustrate the importance of collaboration technologies in cross-disciplinary, global teamwork. Observations indicate that high performance teams that use the collaboration technologies effectively exhibit collaboration readiness at an early stage and manage to define a “third way” to meet the demands of the cross-disciplinary, multi cultural and geographically distributed AEC workspace. The observations and implications represent the blueprint for yearly innovations and improvements to the design of the AEC Global Teamwork program.
We present a software prototype for fluid flow problems in civil engineering, which combines essential features of Computational Steering approaches with efficient methods for model transfer and high performance computing. The main components of the system are described: - The modeler with a focus on the data management of the product model - The pre-processing and the post-processing toolkit - The simulation kernel based on the Lattice Boltzmann method - The required hardware for real-time computing
In this paper, a circulation-type society is expressed by recurrent architecture network described with multi-agent model which consists of the following agents: user, builder, reuse maker, fabricator, waste disposer, material maker and earth bank (see Fig.1). Structural members, materials, resources and monies move among these agents. Each agent has its own rules and aims, regarding structural damages, lifetime, cost reduction, numbers of structural members and structural systems. Reasonable prices of members (fresh, reused, recycled and disposed) can be optimized by GAs in this system considering equal distribution of monies among agents.
The purpose of this research is to develop the method to retrieve a building name from the impression of the building. First, the images of the building are registered as database by the questionnaire. Next, the images of the objective building are compared with the degree of matching in image databases, and the building with high synthetic matching degree is retrieved. This system could get a good retrieval result. Moreover, image processing was done, and image databases are trained by neural network from the amount of characteristics of the image, and the retrieval system by image processing was examined.
Most retaining walls and box culverts built for arterial road construction are simple, and the design process of these structures is often repetitive and labor-intensive because they are so similar in structural configuration. Although some integrated design automation systems developed for retaining walls and box culverts have expedited the design process of these structures, the process of collecting and distributing the resultant engineering documents has not been fully integrated with the computer applications. We have been developing a Web-based design automation system to manage the resultant documents as well as to speed up the repetitive design process. Manipulation of engineering drawings in the Web page is one of the critical functions needed for Web-based design automation. eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and XML-based vector graphics are expected to facilitate the representation of engineering drawings in the Web page. In this paper, we present how we used XML and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) to compose engineering drawings and represent them in the Web page. XML Data Island we designed to define drawing components turned out effective in manipulating the engineering drawings in the Web page.
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.
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. ...
For the management or reorganisation of existing buildings, data concerning dimensions and construction are necessary. Often these data are given exclusively by paper-based drawings and no digital data such as a computer based product model or even a CAD-model are available. In order to perform mass calculation, damage mapping or a recalculation of the structure these drawings of the building under consideration have to be analysed manually by the engineer. This is a very time-consuming job. In order to close this gap between drawings of an existing building and a digital product model an approach is presented in this paper to digitise a drawing, to build up geometric and topologic models and to recognise construction parts of the building. Finally all recognised parts are transformed into a three-dimensional geometric model which provides all necessary geometric information for the product model. During this import process the semantics of a ground floor plan has to be converted into a 3D-model.
Preparation and provision of building information for planning within existing built contexts
(2004)
A prerequisite for planning within existing built contexts is precise information regarding the building substance, its construction and materials, possible damages and any modifications and additions that may have occurred during its lifetime. Using the information collected in a building survey the user should be able to “explore” the building in virtual form, as well as to assess the information contained with regard to a specific planning aspect. The functionality provided by an information module should cover several levels of information provision ranging from ‘simple retrieval’ of relevant information to the analysis and assessment of stored information with regard to particular question sets. Through the provision of basic functionality at an elementary level and the ability to extend this using plug-ins, the system concept of an open extendable system is upheld. Using this modular approach, different levels of information provision can be provided as required during the planning process.
Complex gridshell structures used in architecturally ambitious constructions remain as appealing as ever in the public realm. This paper describes the theory and approach behind the software realisation of a tool which helps in finding the affine self-weight geometry of gridshell structures. The software tool DOMEdesign supports the formal design process of lattice and grid shell structures based upon the laws of physics. The computer-aided simulation of suspension models is used to derive structurally favourable forms for domes and arches subject to compression load, based upon the input of simple architectonic parameters. Irregular plans, three-dimensional topography, a choice different kinds of shell lattice structures and the desired height of the dome are examples of design parameters which can be used to modify the architectural design. The provision of data export formats for structural dimensioning and visualisation software enables engineers and planners to use the data in future planning and to communicate the design to the client.
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.