Precast concrete panels for industrial architecture: knowledge, upgrade and transformation

Research on industrial spaces at national and international level highlights some general topics of particular interest: the current scenario of brownfield sites, the reuse and renovation of factories, the issues of degradation and of the life cycle of building, the focus on industrial heritage as a subject of conservation and valorisation. The study is developed around these topics, aimed at examining them as regards the large industrial spaces made with the use of prefabricated concrete panels, focusing on the industrial architecture that, in Italy, between the \u201850s and \u201880s, represented the greatest occasion to experiment with prefabrication for designers and construction companies, often leading to notable outcomes, which are now objects of studies and protection. The knowledge of this heritage from the recent past start from the analysis and documentation - between architecture and technology - of the evolution and the current issues related to the use of precast concrete building systems for \u2018large spaces\u2019. The understanding of those dynamics allow to identify emergent architecture, meant as works of special values and meanings, which are worthy protection and may assume a central role in the redesign of the territory. In an industrial territory which continuously changes, these production spaces have to find new uses, in a perspective of reuse and renovation through a transformation process which must be respectful of values, restrictions and specific issues. The first phase of the research involves the issue of the knowledge of this particular built heritage, focusing - within the wide context of industrial architecture from the late twentieth century, on the most significant examples of the use of precast concrete panels for the building envelope. This investigation lead to the creation - as the main outcome - of a catalogue, in the form of a database and a website, about Concrete industrial architecture in Italy 1950-1980. The database is conceived as a tool for contextualising, documenting and evaluating the phenomenon of prefabricated industrial architecture in Italy; it could be extended and favours the analysis of technical aspects as well as issues of preservation, upgrade and transformation. The catalogue consists of a collection of industrial architectures characteristic of the period and includes detailed information about relevant prefabricated buildings. The second phase of the study involves the examination of the aspects related to quality and performance of industrial buildings. On the one hand, the issue of protection and preservation of the modern and contemporary industrial heritage emerges; on the other hand, the possibilities for reusing and upgrading it to current requirements are considered. In this sense, prefabricated industrial building are a significant sample of the Italian industrial building stock, which requires upgrade and refurbishment, considering specific architectural features as well as functional, structural, and environmental aspects. The study has focused especially on the issues of environmental quality and, taking into account the regional area, a general framework on the possible methodologies of assessment and strategies of energy retrofit has been discussed. In the final and third phase the study addresses the design aspects related to the transformation of industrial spaces, with an investigation on the form and the building envelope implemented for a significant piece of architecture: the Seleco building, designed in the \u201860s by the architect Gino Valle for the Zanussi Industries and characterised by an original fa\ue7ade system, which connoted it as a significant case in the context of prefabricated architecture for industry. The purpose of reuse and refurbishment of the building become thus the opportunity for proposing upgrade and transformation solutions for the building envelope, taking into account the issues of conservation, functional upgrade and energy retrofit, however respecting the formal and architectural values of the work. As regards the topics addressed by the study, the case-study building shows many elements of interest related to the Italian building tradition for industrial architecture, which combined the techniques and building systems of precast concrete with an aesthetic and architectural research oriented to experimentation, aesthetic and architectural approach oriented towards experimentation, modern architectural languages and the expression of the corporate identity through the workplace. In the current changing context of the spaces linked to the industry, these aspects have, on the one hand, directed policies towards the protection, and, on the other, pointed out new issues regarding the reuse and transformation of buildings. The development of proposals for the case-study is intended, in this sense, as the application of an approach and a series of solutions that are also portable to other buildings of the type under investigation

Reclaiming Brownfields: A Primer for Municipalities

This resource provides information about brownfields redevelopment targeted to municipal planners and decision-makers. The primer defines brownfields, identifies benefits and barriers involved in brownfield redevelopment, discusses related issues such as green building and equitable development, and describes Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and federal brownfields funding and technical assistance resources. The primer is organized within a folder. The folder also contains case studies of brownfield redevelopment projects from the region, as well as two previously-published DVRPC resources on brownfields: the Brownfields Resource Guide: Funding and Technical Assistance for Remediation and Reuse (publication number 07052) and Municipal Implementation Tool #10: Reclaiming Brownfields

Software development: A paradigm for the future

A new paradigm for software development that treats software development as an experimental activity is presented. It provides built-in mechanisms for learning how to develop software better and reusing previous experience in the forms of knowledge, processes, and products. It uses models and measures to aid in the tasks of characterization, evaluation and motivation. An organization scheme is proposed for separating the project-specific focus from the organization's learning and reuse focuses of software development. The implications of this approach for corporations, research and education are discussed and some research activities currently underway at the University of Maryland that support this approach are presented

A Parsing Scheme for Finding the Design Pattern and Reducing the Development Cost of Reusable Object Oriented Software

Because of the importance of object oriented methodologies, the research in developing new measure for object oriented system development is getting increased focus. The most of the metrics need to find the interactions between the objects and modules for developing necessary metric and an influential software measure that is attracting the software developers, designers and researchers. In this paper a new interactions are defined for object oriented system. Using these interactions, a parser is developed to analyze the existing architecture of the software. Within the design model, it is necessary for design classes to collaborate with one another. However, collaboration should be kept to an acceptable minimum i.e. better designing practice will introduce low coupling. If a design model is highly coupled, the system is difficult to implement, to test and to maintain overtime. In case of enhancing software, we need to introduce or remove module and in that case coupling is the most important factor to be considered because unnecessary coupling may make the system unstable and may cause reduction in the system's performance. So coupling is thought to be a desirable goal in software construction, leading to better values for external software qualities such as maintainability, reusability and so on. To test this hypothesis, a good measure of class coupling is needed. In this paper, based on the developed tool called Design Analyzer we propose a methodology to reuse an existing system with the objective of enhancing an existing Object oriented system keeping the coupling as low as possible.Comment: 15 page

Support for collaborative component-based software engineering

Collaborative system composition during design has been poorly supported by traditional CASE tools (which have usually concentrated on supporting individual projects) and almost exclusively focused on static composition. Little support for maintaining large distributed collections of heterogeneous software components across a number of projects has been developed. The CoDEEDS project addresses the collaborative determination, elaboration, and evolution of design spaces that describe both static and dynamic compositions of software components from sources such as component libraries, software service directories, and reuse repositories. The GENESIS project has focussed, in the development of OSCAR, on the creation and maintenance of large software artefact repositories. The most recent extensions are explicitly addressing the provision of cross-project global views of large software collections and historical views of individual artefacts within a collection. The long-term benefits of such support can only be realised if OSCAR and CoDEEDS are widely adopted and steps to facilitate this are described. This book continues to provide a forum, which a recent book, Software Evolution with UML and XML, started, where expert insights are presented on the subject. In that book, initial efforts were made to link together three current phenomena: software evolution, UML, and XML. In this book, focus will be on the practical side of linking them, that is, how UML and XML and their related methods/tools can assist software evolution in practice. Considering that nowadays software starts evolving before it is delivered, an apparent feature for software evolution is that it happens over all stages and over all aspects. Therefore, all possible techniques should be explored. This book explores techniques based on UML/XML and a combination of them with other techniques (i.e., over all techniques from theory to tools). Software evolution happens at all stages. Chapters in this book describe that software evolution issues present at stages of software architecturing, modeling/specifying, assessing, coding, validating, design recovering, program understanding, and reusing. Software evolution happens in all aspects. Chapters in this book illustrate that software evolution issues are involved in Web application, embedded system, software repository, component-based development, object model, development environment, software metrics, UML use case diagram, system model, Legacy system, safety critical system, user interface, software reuse, evolution management, and variability modeling. Software evolution needs to be facilitated with all possible techniques. Chapters in this book demonstrate techniques, such as formal methods, program transformation, empirical study, tool development, standardisation, visualisation, to control system changes to meet organisational and business objectives in a cost-effective way. On the journey of the grand challenge posed by software evolution, the journey that we have to make, the contributory authors of this book have already made further advances

Enterprise application reuse: Semantic discovery of business grid services

Web services have emerged as a prominent paradigm for the development of distributed software systems as they provide the potential for software to be modularized in a way that functionality can be described, discovered and deployed in a platform independent manner over a network (e.g., intranets, extranets and the Internet). This paper examines an extension of this paradigm to encompass ‘Grid Services’, which enables software capabilities to be recast with an operational focus and support a heterogeneous mix of business software and data, termed a Business Grid - "the grid of semantic services". The current industrial representation of services is predominantly syntactic however, lacking the fundamental semantic underpinnings required to fulfill the goals of any semantically-oriented Grid. Consequently, the use of semantic technology in support of business software heterogeneity is investigated as a likely tool to support a diverse and distributed software inventory and user. Service discovery architecture is therefore developed that is (a) distributed in form, (2) supports distributed service knowledge and (3) automatically extends service knowledge (as greater descriptive precision is inferred from the operating application system). This discovery engine is used to execute several real-word scenarios in order to develop and test a framework for engineering such grid service knowledge. The examples presented comprise software components taken from a group of Investment Banking systems. Resulting from the research is a framework for engineering servic

Strategic Directions in Object-Oriented Programming

This paper has provided an overview of the field of object-oriented programming. After presenting a historical perspective and some major achievements in the field, four research directions were introduced: technologies integration, software components, distributed programming, and new paradigms. In general there is a need to continue research in traditional areas:\ud (1) as computer systems become more and more complex, there is a need to further develop the work on architecture and design; \ud (2) to support the development of complex systems, there is a need for better languages, environments, and tools; \ud (3) foundations in the form of the conceptual framework and other theories must be extended to enhance the means for modeling and formal analysis, as well as for understanding future computer systems

Knowledge formalization in experience feedback processes : an ontology-based approach

Because of the current trend of integration and interoperability of industrial systems, their size and complexity continue to grow making it more difficult to analyze, to understand and to solve the problems that happen in their organizations. Continuous improvement methodologies are powerful tools in order to understand and to solve problems, to control the effects of changes and finally to capitalize knowledge about changes and improvements. These tools involve suitably represent knowledge relating to the concerned system. Consequently, knowledge management (KM) is an increasingly important source of competitive advantage for organizations. Particularly, the capitalization and sharing of knowledge resulting from experience feedback are elements which play an essential role in the continuous improvement of industrial activities. In this paper, the contribution deals with semantic interoperability and relates to the structuring and the formalization of an experience feedback (EF) process aiming at transforming information or understanding gained by experience into explicit knowledge. The reuse of such knowledge has proved to have significant impact on achieving themissions of companies. However, the means of describing the knowledge objects of an experience generally remain informal. Based on an experience feedback process model and conceptual graphs, this paper takes domain ontology as a framework for the clarification of explicit knowledge and know-how, the aim of which is to get lessons learned descriptions that are significant, correct and applicable