STRUTEX: A prototype knowledge-based system for initially configuring a structure to support point loads in two dimensions

Only recently have engineers begun making use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools in the area of conceptual design. To continue filling this void in the design process, a prototype knowledge-based system, called STRUTEX has been developed to initially configure a structure to support point loads in two dimensions. This prototype was developed for testing the application of AI tools to conceptual design as opposed to being a testbed for new methods for improving structural analysis and optimization. This system combines numerical and symbolic processing by the computer with interactive problem solving aided by the vision of the user. How the system is constructed to interact with the user is described. Of special interest is the information flow between the knowledge base and the data base under control of the algorithmic main program. Examples of computed and refined structures are presented during the explanation of the system

Improving the structural design process : a knowledge management approach

Knowledge is crucial for structural design, yet existing methodologies for managing it are neither comprehensive nor do they adequately address the requirements of structural engineers. This knowledge exists in different forms and repositories therefore requiring special consideration as to how it should be managed. Poor management of structural design knowledge can result in many problems such as increased design time, reduced quality and decreased scope for innovation. Knowledge Management (KM) remains largely unexplored within the context of structural design although it is a valuable concept. The research in this thesis was aimed at developing a structured approach to managing structural design knowledge. The research methodology adopted consisted of various methods. Literature on structural design and KM was first reviewed. Case studies involving thirteen organisations were then undertaken to investigate the potential of KM for managing structural design knowledge and to develop a conceptual framework and methodologies for formulating KM strategies and evaluating the impact of KM initiatives. Rapid prototyping (based on MS Visual Basic) was used to encapsulate the methodologies into prototype systems, which were evaluated by industry practitioners. The evaluation established that the systems do proffer many benefits to the construction industry and facilitate the development of a KM strategy for managing the very specialised knowledge of structural design. It is concluded that the process of structural design suffers from several problems where managing the tacit and explicit knowledge involved in the process did not receive adequate attention. The research also concludes that KM has the potential to improve the structural design process and that the framework developed and its associated prototypes help to clarify a KM problem, identify goals for implementing KM, develop a KM strategy and evaluate the strategy. The prototypes also support KM at both the strategic and tactical levels, unlike other existing IT tools, which support KM primarily at the operational level. Recommendations for future research include further improvement to the prototypes, additional evaluation using a wider range of real cases and integrating the two prototypes into one system.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

An Application of Artificial Intelligence for Computer-Aided Design and Manufacturing

Presented at the International Conference on Computational Engineering Science: Supercomputing in Multidisciplinary Analysis and Design, Mauna Lani, HI, July 30 - August3, 1995.The knowledge required to integrate aircraft manufacturing characteristics and constraints into the structural design process is beyond the proficiency of a single engineer. Concurrent Engineering (CE) enables the integration of design with manufacturing to permit trades based not only on product performance, but also on other criteria not easily evaluated, such as producibility and support. A decision support system, or Knowledge-Based System, that can direct manufacturing issues during the preliminary design process would be an invaluable tool for system designers. The objective of this technical paper is to clearly describe the development of a Knowledge-Based System (KBS) for the determination of manufacturing processes for selected airframe structural components for the wing of the High Speed Civil Transport (HSCT). The KBS evolving with this research will be utilized within an integrated design environment along with existing tools to demonstrate its functionality as a design tool. The system will empower engineers to design the strongest, lightest possible wing structure at the least cost that meets the load-carrying requirements for a specified aircraft range. The paper outlines the knowledge- and rule-base development required to build the KBS. The interfaces and relations to CAD packages, external synthesis and analysis codes, as well as links to cost estimating software and methods are discussed

Assessing Knowledge Organization Systems from a gender perspective: Wikipedia Taxonomy and Wikidata Ontologies

Develop a comprehensive framework for assessing the knowledge organization system (KOS), including the taxonomy of Wikipedia and the ontologies of Wikidata, with a specific focus on enhancing management and retrieval with a gender non-binary perspective.This study employs heuristic and inspection methods to assess Wikipedia's Knowledge Organization Systems, ensuring compliance with international standards. It evaluates the efficiency of retrieving non-masculine gender-related articles using the Catalan Wikipedian category scheme, identifying limitations. Additionally, a novel assessment of Wikidata ontologies examines their structure and coverage of gender-related properties, comparing them to Wikipedia's taxonomy for advantages and enhancements.This study evaluates Wikipedia's taxonomy and Wikidata's ontologies, establishing evaluation criteria for gender-based categorization and exploring their structural effectiveness. The evaluation process suggests that Wikidata ontologies may offer a viable solution to address Wikipedia's categorization challenges.The assessment of Wikipedia categories (taxonomy) based on Knowledge Organization System standards leads to the conclusion that there is ample room for improvement, not only in matters concerning gender identity but also in the overall knowledge organization system to enhance search and retrieval for users. These findings bear relevance for the design of tools to support information retrieval on knowledge-rich websites, as they assist users in exploring topics and concepts.</p

An ontology-based holistic approach for multi-objective sustainable structural design

Building construction industry has significant impact on sustainability. The construction, operation and maintenance of buildings account for approximately 50% of global energy usage and anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In recent years, the embodied energy and carbon are identified increasingly important in terms of sustainability throughout building life cycle. Incorporation of sustainable development in building structural design becomes undoubtedly crucial. The effective building design requires smart and holistic tools that can process multi-objective and inter-connected domain knowledge to provide genuine sustainable buildings. With the advancement of information and communication technologies, various methods and techniques have been applied to accomplish the multiple objectives of sustainable development in building design. One of the most successful approaches is building information modelling (BIM), which requires further enhancement of interoperability. The emergence of Semantic Web technology provides more opportunity to improve the information modelling, knowledge management and system integration. The research presented in this thesis investigates how ontology and Semantic Web rules can be used in a knowledge-based holistic system, in order to integrate information about structural design and sustainability, and facilitate decision-making in design process by recommending appropriate solutions for different use cases. A research prototype namely OntoSCS incorporating OWL ontology and SWRL rules has been developed and tested in typical structural design cases. The holistic approach considers five inter-connected dimensions of sustainability, including structural feasibility, embodied energy and carbon, cost, durability and safety. In addition, the selection of structural material supplier and criteria in sustainability assessment are taken into account as well. This research concludes that the Semantic Web technology can be applied to structural design at early stage to provide multi-criteria optimised solution. The methodology and framework employed in this study can be further adapted as a generic multi-criteria and holistic decision support system for other domains in construction sector

Water Integration for Squamscott Exeter (WISE): Preliminary Integrated Plan, Final Technical Report

This document introduces the goals, background and primary elements of an Integrated Plan for the Lower Exeter and Squamscott River in the Great Bay estuary in southern New Hampshire. This Plan will support management of point (wastewater treatment plant) and nonpoint sources in the communities of Exeter, Stratham and Newfields. The Plan also identifies and quantifies the advantages of the use of green infrastructure as a critical tool for nitrogen management and describes how collaboration between those communities could form the basis for an integrated plan. The Plan will help communities meet new wastewater and proposed stormwater permit requirements. Critical next steps are need before this Plan will fulfill the 2018 Nitrogen Control Plan requirements for Exeter and proposed draft MS4 requirements for both Stratham and Exeter. These next steps include conducting a financial capability assessment, development of an implementation schedule and development of a detailed implementation plan. The collaborative process used to develop this Plan was designed to provide decision makers at the local, state and federal levels with the knowledge they need to trust the Plan’s findings and recommendations, and to enable discussions between stakeholders to continue the collaborative process. This Plan includes the following information to guide local response to new federal permit requirements for treating and discharging stormwater and wastewater: Sources of annual pollutant load quantified by type and community; Assessment and evaluation of different treatment control strategies for each type of pollutant load; Assessment and evaluation of nutrient control strategies designed to reduce specific types of pollutants; Evaluation of a range of point source controls at the wastewater treatment facility based on regulatory requirements; Costs associated with a range of potential control strategies to achieve reduction of nitrogen and other pollutants of concern; and A preliminary implementation schedule with milestones for target load reductions using specific practices for specific land uses at points in time; Recommendations on how to implement a tracking and accounting program to document implementation; Design tools such as BMP performance curves for crediting the use of structural practices to support nitrogen accounting requirements; and Next Steps for how to complete this Plan

IDR : a participatory methodology for interdisciplinary design in technology enhanced learning

One of the important themes that emerged from the CAL’07 conference was the failure of technology to bring about the expected disruptive effect to learning and teaching. We identify one of the causes as an inherent weakness in prevalent development methodologies. While the problem of designing technology for learning is irreducibly multi-dimensional, design processes often lack true interdisciplinarity. To address this problem we present IDR, a participatory methodology for interdisciplinary techno-pedagogical design, drawing on the design patterns tradition (Alexander, Silverstein & Ishikawa, 1977) and the design research paradigm (DiSessa & Cobb, 2004). We discuss the iterative development and use of our methodology by a pan-European project team of educational researchers, software developers and teachers. We reflect on our experiences of the participatory nature of pattern design and discuss how, as a distributed team, we developed a set of over 120 design patterns, created using our freely available open source web toolkit. Furthermore, we detail how our methodology is applicable to the wider community through a workshop model, which has been run and iteratively refined at five major international conferences, involving over 200 participants

A web-based teaching/learning environment to support collaborative knowledge construction in design

A web-based application has been developed as part of a recently completed research which proposed a conceptual framework to collect, analyze and compare different design experiences and to construct structured representations of the emerging knowledge in digital architectural design. The paper introduces the theoretical and practical development of this application as a teaching/learning environment which has significantly contributed to the development and testing of the ideas developed throughout the research. Later in the paper, the application of BLIP in two experimental (design) workshops is reported and evaluated according to the extent to which the application facilitates generation, modification and utilization of design knowledge

Construction safety and digital design: a review

As digital technologies become widely used in designing buildings and infrastructure, questions arise about their impacts on construction safety. This review explores relationships between construction safety and digital design practices with the aim of fostering and directing further research. It surveys state-of-the-art research on databases, virtual reality, geographic information systems, 4D CAD, building information modeling and sensing technologies, finding various digital tools for addressing safety issues in the construction phase, but few tools to support design for construction safety. It also considers a literature on safety critical, digital and design practices that raises a general concern about ‘mindlessness’ in the use of technologies, and has implications for the emerging research agenda around construction safety and digital design. Bringing these strands of literature together suggests new kinds of interventions, such as the development of tools and processes for using digital models to promote mindfulness through multi-party collaboration on safet

Specification of vertical semantic consistency rules of UML class diagram refinement using logical approach

Unified Modelling Language (UML) is the most popular modelling language use for software design in software development industries with a class diagram being the most frequently use diagram. Despite the popularity of UML, it is being affected by inconsistency problems of its diagrams at the same or different abstraction levels. Inconsistency in UML is mostly caused by existence of various views on the same system and sometimes leads to potentially conflicting system specifications. In general, syntactic consistency can be automatically checked and therefore is supported by current UML Computer-aided Software Engineering (CASE) tools. Semantic consistency problems, unlike syntactic consistency problems, there exists no specific method for specifying semantic consistency rules and constraints. Therefore, this research has specified twenty-four abstraction rules of class‟s relation semantic among any three related classes of a refined class diagram to semantically equivalent relations of two of the classes using a logical approach. This research has also formalized three vertical semantic consistency rules of a class diagram refinement identified by previous researchers using a logical approach and a set of formalized abstraction rules. The results were successfully evaluated using hotel management system and passenger list system case studies and were found to be reliable and efficient