Construction safety and digital design: a review

As digital technologies become widely used in designing buildings and infrastructure, questions arise about their impacts on construction safety. This review explores relationships between construction safety and digital design practices with the aim of fostering and directing further research. It surveys state-of-the-art research on databases, virtual reality, geographic information systems, 4D CAD, building information modeling and sensing technologies, finding various digital tools for addressing safety issues in the construction phase, but few tools to support design for construction safety. It also considers a literature on safety critical, digital and design practices that raises a general concern about ‘mindlessness’ in the use of technologies, and has implications for the emerging research agenda around construction safety and digital design. Bringing these strands of literature together suggests new kinds of interventions, such as the development of tools and processes for using digital models to promote mindfulness through multi-party collaboration on safet

POWER LINES AS LOCAL AREA NETWORKS FOR MEASURING AND CONTROL SIGNAL TRANSMISSION

Electrical power distribution networks represent the most attractive medium for digital communication purposes due to an ever increasing demand for environmental management of buildings, security monitoring, office automation or remote control of customer appliances and remote meter reading. Power lines are, however, heavily stressed with interference from various sources. Both interference and attenuation are time-variant and frequency-selective in an arbitrary way. The prospective user has to overcome the impairments with a severely restricted level of transmission power, e.g. 5 mW in Germany; the transmission bandwidth, however, exceeds 100 kHz. Obviously simple and inexpensive modulation schemes for digital data transmission such as amplitude shift keying (ASK) or frequency shift keying (FSK) are ruled out. A significant success of band-spreading techniques has been demonstrated by several field trials and extended measurements at different power line networks. Application of spread spectrum techniques generally involves high effort; this is especially true for frequency hopping, which proved advantageous in practical applications. Exploiting the possibilities of modern microelectronics, including design and production of ASICs, recently led to a break-through. A five-year research project based on frequency hopping spread spectrum signaling opened up power lines as local area networks e.g. for office automation or remote meter reading. Transmitter and receiver prototypes were constructed for evaluation of the proposed ideas at various power line networks. Transmitters are based on standard microcontrollers, whereas an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) with a complexity of about ·5000 gates is the heart of the receiver. Due to completely digital signal processing. the prototypes are useful as a base for series production

Chippe : a system for constraint driven behavioral synthesis

This report describes the Chippe system, gives some background previous work and describes several sample design runs of the system. Also presented are the sources of the design tradeoffs used by Chippe, and overview of the internal design model, and experiences using the system

Special Session on Industry 4.0

No abstract available

A computer-based product classification and component detection for demanufacturing processes

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in International Journal of Computer Integrated Manufacturing, 24(10), 900-914, 2011 [copyright Taylor & Francis], available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/0951192X.2011.579169.The aim of this paper is to propose a novel computer-based product classification, component detection and tracking for demanufacturing and disassembly process. This is achieved by introducing a series of automated and sequential product scanning, component identification, image analysis and sorting – leading to the development of a bill of material (BOM). The produced BOM can then be associated with the relevant disassembly/demanufacture proviso. The proposed integrated image sorting and product classification (ISPC) approach can be considered as a step forward in automation of demanufacturing activities. The ISPC model proposed in this paper utilises and builds on the state-of-the-art technology and current body of research in computer-integrated demanufacturing and remanufacturing (CIDR). An appraisal of the latest research material and the factors that inhibit CIDR methods inpractice are presented. A novel solution for the integration of imaging and material identification techniques toovercome some of the existing shortcomings of automated recycling processes is proposed in this paper. The proposed product scanning and component detection ISPC software consists of four distinct models: the repertory database, the search engine, the product-attributes updater and the image sorting and classification algorithm. The software framework that integrates the four components is presented in this paper. Finally, an overall assessment of applying ISPC at various stages of CIDR processes concludes the article.University of Ibadan MacArthur Foundation Gran

BIM semantic-enrichment for built heritage representation

In the built heritage context, BIM has shown difficulties in representing and managing the large and complex knowledge related to non-geometrical aspects of the heritage. Within this scope, this paper focuses on a domain-specific semantic-enrichment of BIM methodology, aimed at fulfilling semantic representation requirements of built heritage through Semantic Web technologies. To develop this semantic-enriched BIM approach, this research relies on the integration of a BIM environment with a knowledge base created through information ontologies. The result is knowledge base system - and a prototypal platform - that enhances semantic representation capabilities of BIM application to architectural heritage processes. It solves the issue of knowledge formalization in cultural heritage informative models, favouring a deeper comprehension and interpretation of all the building aspects. Its open structure allows future research to customize, scale and adapt the knowledge base different typologies of artefacts and heritage activities

Agent Based Test and Repair of Distributed Systems

This article demonstrates how to use intelligent agents for testing and repairing a distributed system, whose elements may or may not have embedded BIST (Built-In Self-Test) and BISR (Built-In Self-Repair) facilities. Agents are software modules that perform monitoring, diagnosis and repair of the faults. They form together a society whose members communicate, set goals and solve tasks. An experimental solution is presented, and future developments of the proposed approach are explore