Advective water quality model for urban watercourses.

A project report submitted to the Faculty of Engineering, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Engineerrng,As has happened throughout the world. environmental and water quality problems related to developing urban and industrial areas and associated accumulation of waste in built-up areas were the main factors in contributing to sanitary awareness in South Africa. The dwindling water resources and persistent deterioration of water quality, more severely in urban areas, necessitates the review the current practice of storm water management in South Africa. Reliable stormwater drainage models evaluating both the water quantity and quality could be essential in confronting the prevailing pollution problems. The objective of this project was conceived to be the development of a system for the simulation of water quality in urban watercourses, A personal computer compatible model for joint transportation of hydrograph and pollutographs in open channels was developed. The model comprises an operational data handling facility, a user friendly and interactive interface. The study revealed that: Urban and Industrial development results in complication of the urban water system. • Single objectivity approaches in management of urban watercourses are outdated . .. The proposed model is capable of simultaneously routing flood and pollutant condiment waves in open channels. Understanding of aspects of the water quality in urban watercourse can be greatly enhanced by the proposed model. The following recommendations were henceforth made: • Detailed study of the nature. quantity and sources of pollutants in the urban water system. .. Sophisticated (dynamic wave. supercritical flow, complicated ..................... hydrodynamic model snould be considered, • Biological and, chemical process in the urban watercourse be incorporated. • Linking of the water quality model to the storm water drainage model,Andrew Chakane 201

Enabling Self-aware Smart Buildings by Augmented Reality

Conventional HVAC control systems are usually incognizant of the physical structures and materials of buildings. These systems merely follow pre-set HVAC control logic based on abstract building thermal response models, which are rough approximations to true physical models, ignoring dynamic spatial variations in built environments. To enable more accurate and responsive HVAC control, this paper introduces the notion of "self-aware" smart buildings, such that buildings are able to explicitly construct physical models of themselves (e.g., incorporating building structures and materials, and thermal flow dynamics). The question is how to enable self-aware buildings that automatically acquire dynamic knowledge of themselves. This paper presents a novel approach using "augmented reality". The extensive user-environment interactions in augmented reality not only can provide intuitive user interfaces for building systems, but also can capture the physical structures and possibly materials of buildings accurately to enable real-time building simulation and control. This paper presents a building system prototype incorporating augmented reality, and discusses its applications.Comment: This paper appears in ACM International Conference on Future Energy Systems (e-Energy), 201

Model-based groupware solution for distributed real-time collaborative 4D planning via teamwork

Construction planning plays a fundamental role in construction project management that requires team working among planners from a diverse range of disciplines and in geographically dispersed working situations. Model-based four-dimensional (4D) computer-aided design (CAD) groupware, though considered a possible approach to supporting collaborative planning, is still short of effective collaborative mechanisms for teamwork due to methodological, technological and social challenges. Targeting this problem, this paper proposes a model-based groupware solution to enable a group of multidisciplinary planners to perform real-time collaborative 4D planning across the Internet. In the light of the interactive definition method, and its computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW) design analysis, the paper discusses the realization of interactive collaborative mechanisms from software architecture, application mode, and data exchange protocol. These mechanisms have been integrated into a groupware solution, which was validated by a planning team in a truly geographically dispersed condition. Analysis of the validation results revealed that the proposed solution is feasible for real-time collaborative 4D planning to gain a robust construction plan through collaborative teamwork. The realization of this solution triggers further considerations about its enhancement for wider groupware applications

Operations research and computers

operational research

Developing interest management techniques in distributed interactive simulation using Java

Bandwidth consumption in distributed real time simulation, or networked real time simulation, is a major problem as the number of participants and the sophistication of joint simulation exercises grow in size. The paper briefly reviews distributed real time simulation and bandwidth reduction techniques and introduces the Generic Runtime Infrastructure for Distributed Simulation (GRIDS) as a research architecture for studying such problems. GRIDS uses Java abstract classes to promote distributed services called thin agents, a novel approach to implementing distributed simulation services, such as user defined bandwidth reduction mechanisms, and to distributing the executable code across the simulation. Thin agents offer the advantages of traditional agents without the overhead imposed by mobility or continuous state, which are unnecessary in this context. We present our implementation and some predicted results from message reduction studies using thin agent