167,174 research outputs found
Designing low carbon buildings : a framework to reduce energy consumption and embed the use of renewables
EU policies to mitigate climate change set ambitious goals for energy and carbon reduction for the built environment. In order meet and even exceed the EU targets the UK Government's Climate Change Act 2008 sets a target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the UK by at least 80% from 1990 levels by 2050. To support these targets the UK government also aims to ensure that 20% of the UK's electricity is supplied from renewable sources by 2020. This article presents a design framework and a set of integrated IT tools to enable an analysis of the energy performance of building designs, including consideration of active and passive renewable energy technologies, when the opportunity to substantially improve the whole life-cycle energy performance of those designs is still open. To ensure a good fit with current architectural practices the design framework is integrated with the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) key stages, which is the most widely used framework for the delivery of construction projects. The main aims of this article are to illustrate the need for new approaches to support low carbon building design that can be integrated into current architectural practice, to present the design framework developed in this research and illustrate its application in a case study
Survey instrument for measuring level of preparedness amongst healthcare personnel in radiation emergency
Drills and exercises are globally practiced to investigate the level of preparedness towards disaster events. However, these activities
are rarely conducted because they require substantial investment, specifically to budget and time. A self-reported survey may serve
as an alternative approach, although it may not be as effective as drills and exercises. As part of the survey development process,
this article discusses preliminary validation of a survey instrument to measure the level of preparedness towards radiation
emergency amongst healthcare personnel. Prior to this validation process, extensive literature reviews pointed out that the
instrument consists of three constructs of preparedness, namely readiness, willingness, and ability. A total of seven subject matter
experts were invited to judge the contents for verification purposes. Randolph Kappa analysis was then conducted to analyse their
judgment to allow irrelevant items to be filtered from the rest prior to any improvements. Initially, the survey instrument consisted
of 69 items; however, the analysis omitted 16 of them. The following values for each preparedness construct were: Readiness (0.77),
Willingness (0.70), and Ability (0.73). These findings indicate that contents of the instrument are valid. Further analysis should be
fulfilled to complete validation process to ensure its practicality prior to using it as an evaluation tool
The interaction of lean and building information modeling in construction
Lean construction and Building Information Modeling are quite different initiatives, but both are having profound impacts on the construction industry. A rigorous analysis of the myriad specific interactions between them indicates that a synergy exists which, if properly understood in theoretical terms, can be exploited to improve construction processes beyond the degree to which it might be improved by application of either of these paradigms independently. Using a matrix that juxtaposes BIM functionalities with prescriptive lean construction principles, fifty-six interactions have been identified, all but four of which represent constructive interaction. Although evidence for the majority of these has been found, the matrix is not considered complete, but rather a framework for research to
explore the degree of validity of the interactions. Construction executives, managers, designers and developers of IT systems for construction can also benefit from the framework as an aid to recognizing the potential synergies when planning their lean and BIM adoption strategies
Parallelization of cycle-based logic simulation
Verification of digital circuits by Cycle-based simulation can be performed in parallel. The parallel implementation requires two phases: the compilation phase, that sets up the data needed for the
execution of the simulation, and the simulation phase, that consists in executing the parallel simulation of the considered circuit for a certain number of cycles. During the early phase of design, compilation phase has to be repeated each time a bug is found. Thus, if the time of the compilation phase is too high, the advantages stemming from the parallel approach may be lost. In this work we propose an
effective version of the compilation phase and compute the corresponding execution time. We also analyze the percentage of execution time required by the different steps of the compilation phase for
a set of literature benchmarks. Further, we implemented the simulation phase exploiting the GPU architecture, and we computed the execution times for a set of benchmarks obtaining values comparable
with literature ones. Finally, we implemented the sequential version of the Cycle-based simulation in such a way that the execution time is optimized. We used the sequential values to compute the speedup
of the parallel version for the considered set of benchmarks
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