Evolution of RFID applications in construction:A literature review

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology has been widely used in the field of construction during the last two decades. Basically, RFID facilitates the control on a wide variety of processes in different stages of the lifecycle of a building, from its conception to its inhabitance. The main objective of this paper is to present a review of RFID applications in the construction industry, pointing out the existing developments, limitations and gaps. The paper presents the establishment of the RFID technology in four main stages of the lifecycle of a facility: planning and design, construction and commission and operation and maintenance. Concerning this last stage, an RFID application aiming to facilitate the identification of pieces of furniture in scanned inhabited environments is presented. Conclusions and future advances are presented at the end of the paper

Personalized City Tours - An Extension of the OGC OpenLocation Specification

A business trip to London last month , a day visit in Cologne next saturday and romantic weekend in Paris in autumn – this example exhibits one of the central characteristics of today’s tourism. People in the western hemisphere take much pleasure in frequent and repeated short term visits of cities. Every city visitor faces the general problems of where to go and what to see in the diverse microcosm of a metropolis. This thesis presents a framework for the generation of personalized city tours - as extension of the Open Location Specification of the Open Geospatial Consortium. It is founded on context-awareness and personalization while at the same time proposing a combined approach to allow for adaption to the user. This framework considers TimeGeography and its algorithmic implementations to be able to cope with spatio-temporal constraints of a city tour. Traveling salesmen problems - for which a heuristic approache is proposed – are subjacent to the tour generation. To meet the requirements of today’s distributed and heterogeneous computing environments, the tour framework comprises individual services that expose standard-compliant interfaces and allow for integration in service oriented architectures

Task Allocation in Foraging Robot Swarms:The Role of Information Sharing

Autonomous task allocation is a desirable feature of robot swarms that collect and deliver items in scenarios where congestion, caused by accumulated items or robots, can temporarily interfere with swarm behaviour. In such settings, self-regulation of workforce can prevent unnecessary energy consumption. We explore two types of self-regulation: non-social, where robots become idle upon experiencing congestion, and social, where robots broadcast information about congestion to their team mates in order to socially inhibit foraging. We show that while both types of self-regulation can lead to improved energy efficiency and increase the amount of resource collected, the speed with which information about congestion flows through a swarm affects the scalability of these algorithms

Interdisziplinäre Kooperation bei der Erstellung virtueller geschichtswissenschaftlicher 3D-Rekonstruktionen

Virtuelle 3D-Modelle finden in den historischen Disziplinen in zweierlei Art Verwendung. Zum einen dienen diese zur Erfassung und Digitalisierung existierender historischer Objekte. Daneben dient die Erstellung von virtuellen 3D-Rekonstruktionen der Nachbildung nicht mehr existierender Objekte und Strukturen. Während technische Abläufe beider Ansätze ebenso wie methodische und wissenschaftstheoretische Aspekte in der Fachliteratur häufig und umfassend thematisiert werden, ist eine Frage nach sozialen Aspekten und sozialer Interaktion im Kontext derartiger Vorhaben bisher unbeleuchtet geblieben. Ziel der Arbeit stellt dar, eine Bandbreite und Relevanz von Aspekten der Kooperation als „Zusammenarbeit mit gemeinsamem Ziel, gegenseitiger Abstimmung, planvollem Vorgehen sowie Vorteilen für alle Akteure“ (Hagenhoff, 2004) im Kontext derartiger geschichtswissenschaftlicher 3D-Modellierungsvorhaben mittels sozialwissenschaftlicher Methoden zu beleuchten. Dabei zielt eine Darlegung auf unterschiedliche Skalierungen von Kooperation ab – angefangen bei einer Wissenschaftslandschaft über Kooperationsstrukturen bis hin zu einer Betrachtung von spezifischen Kooperationsphänomenen und -strategien innerhalb von Arbeits- und Erstellungsprozessen