Increasing information feed in the process of structural steel design

Research initiatives throughout history have shown how a designer typically makes associations and references to a vast amount of knowledge based on experiences to make decisions. With the increasing usage of information systems in our everyday lives, one might imagine an information system that provides designers access to the ‘architectural memories’ of other architectural designers during the design process, in addition to their own physical architectural memory. In this paper, we discuss how the increased adoption of semantic web technologies might advance this idea. We investigate to what extent information can be described with these technologies in the context of structural steel design. This investigation indicates significant possibilities regarding information reuse in the process of structural steel design and, by extent, in other design contexts as well. However, important obstacles and question remarks can still be outlined as well

Business models and information systems for sustainable development

Businesses are expected to explore market opportunities in the area of sustainable development, thus contributing to finding solutions aiming at sustainable quality of life. This will require adaptation and innovation of business models and information systems, with challenges of particular interest to the business modeling and software design community. This paper briefly discusses two relevant topics in this respect, namely (i) goal and value modeling, and (ii) model-driven development. We mention existing work that can be taken as a starting point for addressing sustainability issues, and we make some observations that may be taken into account when extending existing work

Project report. A subtropical urban community, investigating medium to high density residential typologies by Design Charrette

The Centre for Subtropical Design at QUT, in partnership with the Queensland Government and Brisbane City Council, conducts research focused on 'best practice' outcomes for higher density urban living environments in the subtropics through the study of typical urban residential typologies, and urban design. The aim of the research is to inform and illustrate best practice subtropical design principles to policy makers and development industry professionals to stimulate climate-responsive outcomes. The Centre for Subtropical Design recently sought project-specific funding from the Queensland Department of Infrastructure and Planning (DIP) to investigate residential typologies for sustainable subtropical urban communities, based on transit orientated development principles and outcomes for areas around public transport nodes. A development site within the Fitzgibbon Urban Development Area, and close to a rail and bsu transport corridor, provided a case study location for this project. Four design-led multi-disciplinary creative teams participated in a Design Charrette and have produced concept drawings and propositions on a range of options, or prototypes. Analysis of selected prototypes has been undertaken to determine their environmental, economic and social performance. This Project Report discusses the scope of the project funded by DIP in terms of activities undertaken to date, and deliverables achieved. A subsequent Research Report will discuss the detailed findings of the analysis

Architecture of Environmental Risk Modelling: for a faster and more robust response to natural disasters

Demands on the disaster response capacity of the European Union are likely to increase, as the impacts of disasters continue to grow both in size and frequency. This has resulted in intensive research on issues concerning spatially-explicit information and modelling and their multiple sources of uncertainty. Geospatial support is one of the forms of assistance frequently required by emergency response centres along with hazard forecast and event management assessment. Robust modelling of natural hazards requires dynamic simulations under an array of multiple inputs from different sources. Uncertainty is associated with meteorological forecast and calibration of the model parameters. Software uncertainty also derives from the data transformation models (D-TM) needed for predicting hazard behaviour and its consequences. On the other hand, social contributions have recently been recognized as valuable in raw-data collection and mapping efforts traditionally dominated by professional organizations. Here an architecture overview is proposed for adaptive and robust modelling of natural hazards, following the Semantic Array Programming paradigm to also include the distributed array of social contributors called Citizen Sensor in a semantically-enhanced strategy for D-TM modelling. The modelling architecture proposes a multicriteria approach for assessing the array of potential impacts with qualitative rapid assessment methods based on a Partial Open Loop Feedback Control (POLFC) schema and complementing more traditional and accurate a-posteriori assessment. We discuss the computational aspect of environmental risk modelling using array-based parallel paradigms on High Performance Computing (HPC) platforms, in order for the implications of urgency to be introduced into the systems (Urgent-HPC).Comment: 12 pages, 1 figure, 1 text box, presented at the 3rd Conference of Computational Interdisciplinary Sciences (CCIS 2014), Asuncion, Paragua

Eco‐Holonic 4.0 Circular Business Model to Conceptualize Sustainable Value Chain Towards Digital Transition

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize a circular business model based on an Eco-Holonic Architecture, through the integration of circular economy and holonic principles. A conceptual model is developed to manage the complexity of integrating circular economy principles, digital transformation, and tools and frameworks for sustainability into business models. The proposed architecture is multilevel and multiscale in order to achieve the instantiation of the sustainable value chain in any territory. The architecture promotes the incorporation of circular economy and holonic principles into new circular business models. This integrated perspective of business model can support the design and upgrade of the manufacturing companies in their respective industrial sectors. The conceptual model proposed is based on activity theory that considers the interactions between technical and social systems and allows the mitigation of the metabolic rift that exists between natural and social metabolism. This study contributes to the existing literature on circular economy, circular business models and activity theory by considering holonic paradigm concerns, which have not been explored yet. This research also offers a unique holonic architecture of circular business model by considering different levels, relationships, dynamism and contextualization (territory) aspects

Energy challenges for ICT

The energy consumption from the expanding use of information and communications technology (ICT) is unsustainable with present drivers, and it will impact heavily on the future climate change. However, ICT devices have the potential to contribute signi - cantly to the reduction of CO2 emission and enhance resource e ciency in other sectors, e.g., transportation (through intelligent transportation and advanced driver assistance systems and self-driving vehicles), heating (through smart building control), and manu- facturing (through digital automation based on smart autonomous sensors). To address the energy sustainability of ICT and capture the full potential of ICT in resource e - ciency, a multidisciplinary ICT-energy community needs to be brought together cover- ing devices, microarchitectures, ultra large-scale integration (ULSI), high-performance computing (HPC), energy harvesting, energy storage, system design, embedded sys- tems, e cient electronics, static analysis, and computation. In this chapter, we introduce challenges and opportunities in this emerging eld and a common framework to strive towards energy-sustainable ICT

Affordances, constraints and information flows as ‘leverage points’ in design for sustainable behaviour

Copyright @ 2012 Social Science Electronic PublishingTwo of Donella Meadows' 'leverage points' for intervening in systems (1999) seem particularly pertinent to design for sustainable behaviour, in the sense that designers may have the scope to implement them in (re-)designing everyday products and services. The 'rules of the system' -- interpreted here to refer to affordances and constraints -- and the structure of information flows both offer a range of opportunities for design interventions to in fluence behaviour change, and in this paper, some of the implications and possibilities are discussed with reference to parallel concepts from within design, HCI and relevant areas of psychology

Advanced Techniques for Assets Maintenance Management

16th IFAC Symposium on Information Control Problems in Manufacturing INCOM 2018 Bergamo, Italy, 11–13 June 2018. Edited by Marco Macchi, László Monostori, Roberto PintoThe aim of this paper is to remark the importance of new and advanced techniques supporting decision making in different business processes for maintenance and assets management, as well as the basic need of adopting a certain management framework with a clear processes map and the corresponding IT supporting systems. Framework processes and systems will be the key fundamental enablers for success and for continuous improvement. The suggested framework will help to define and improve business policies and work procedures for the assets operation and maintenance along their life cycle. The following sections present some achievements on this focus, proposing finally possible future lines for a research agenda within this field of assets management