Toward digital twins for sawmill production planning and control : benefits, opportunities and challenges

Sawmills are key elements of the forest product industry supply chain, and they play important economic, social, and environmental roles. Sawmill production planning and control are, however, challenging owing to severalfactors, including, but not limited to, the heterogeneity of the raw material. The emerging concept of digital twins introduced in the context of Industry 4.0 has generated high interest and has been studied in a variety of domains, including production planning and control. In this paper, we investigate the benefits digital twins would bring to the sawmill industry via a literature review on the wider subject of sawmill production planning and control. Opportunities facilitating their implementation, as well as ongoing challenges from both academic and industrial perspectives, are also studied

Development of an integrated product information management system

This thesis reports on a research project undertaken over a four year period investigating and developing a software framework and application for integrating and managing building product information for construction engineering. The research involved extensive literature research, observation of the industry practices and interviews with construction industry practitioners and systems implementers to determine how best to represent and present product information to support the construction process. Applicable product models for information representation were reviewed and evaluated to determine present suitability. The IFC product model was found to be the most applicable. Investigations of technologies supporting the product model led to the development of a software tool, the IFC Assembly Viewer, which aided further investigations into the suitability of the product model (in its current state) for the exchange and sharing of product information. A software framework, or reusable software design and application, called PROduct Information Management System (PROMIS), was developed based on a non-standard product model but with flexibility to work with the IFC product model when sufficiently mature. The software comprises three subsystems namely: ProductWeb, ModelManager.NET and Product/Project Service (or P2Service). The key features of this system were shared project databases, parametric product specification, integration of product information sources, and application interaction and integration through interface components. PROMIS was applied to and tested with a modular construction business for the management of product information and for integration of product and project information through the design and construction (production) process

Role of Semantic web in the changing context of Enterprise Collaboration

In order to compete with the global giants, enterprises are concentrating on their core competencies and collaborating with organizations that compliment their skills and core activities. The current trend is to develop temporary alliances of independent enterprises, in which companies can come together to share skills, core competencies and resources. However, knowledge sharing and communication among multidiscipline companies is a complex and challenging problem. In a collaborative environment, the meaning of knowledge is drastically affected by the context in which it is viewed and interpreted; thus necessitating the treatment of structure as well as semantics of the data stored in enterprise repositories. Keeping the present market and technological scenario in mind, this research aims to propose tools and techniques that can enable companies to assimilate distributed information resources and achieve their business goals

The 45th Australasian Universities Building Education Association Conference: Global Challenges in a Disrupted World: Smart, Sustainable and Resilient Approaches in the Built Environment, Conference Proceedings, 23 - 25 November 2022, Western Sydney University, Kingswood Campus, Sydney, Australia

This is the proceedings of the 45th Australasian Universities Building Education Association (AUBEA) conference which will be hosted by Western Sydney University in November 2022. The conference is organised by the School of Engineering, Design, and Built Environment in collaboration with the Centre for Smart Modern Construction, Western Sydney University. This year’s conference theme is “Global Challenges in a Disrupted World: Smart, Sustainable and Resilient Approaches in the Built Environment”, and expects to publish over a hundred double-blind peer review papers under the proceedings

Measuring knowledge sharing processes through social network analysis within construction organisations

The construction industry is a knowledge intensive and information dependent industry. Organisations risk losing valuable knowledge, when the employees leave them. Therefore, construction organisations need to nurture opportunities to disseminate knowledge through strengthening knowledge-sharing networks. This study aimed at evaluating the formal and informal knowledge sharing methods in social networks within Australian construction organisations and identifying how knowledge sharing could be improved. Data were collected from two estimating teams in two case studies. The collected data through semi-structured interviews were analysed using UCINET, a Social Network Analysis (SNA) tool, and SNA measures. The findings revealed that one case study consisted of influencers, while the other demonstrated an optimal knowledge sharing structure in both formal and informal knowledge sharing methods. Social networks could vary based on the organisation as well as the individuals’ behaviour. Identifying networks with specific issues and taking steps to strengthen networks will enable to achieve optimum knowledge sharing processes. This research offers knowledge sharing good practices for construction organisations to optimise their knowledge sharing processes

Process-oriented Information Logistics: Aligning Enterprise Information with Business Processes

Today, enterprises are confronted with a continuously increasing amount of data. Examples of such data include office files, e-mails, process descriptions, and data from process-aware information systems. This data overload makes it difficult for knowledge-workers to identify the information they need to perform their tasks in the best possible way. Particularly challenging is the alignment of process-related information with business processes. In fact, process-related information and business processes are usually managed separately. On the one hand, enterprise content management systems, shared drives, and Intranet portals are used for organizing information, on the other hand, process management technology is used to design and enact business processes. With process-oriented information logistics (POIL) this paper presents an approach for bridging this gap. POIL enables the process-oriented and context-aware delivery of process-related information to knowledge-workers. We also present a clinical use case and a proof-of-concept prototype to demonstrate the application and benefits of POIL

Artificial intelligence in project management: a brief systematic literature review

Project management is a common field in many industries, and it is not immune to the innovations that artificial intelligence is bringing to the world. Even so the application of artificial intelligence is not that widespread in companies and especially not in all of project management areas. The reasons are not clear but seem to be related to the uncertainty of the application of artificial intelligence in project management. The purpose was to acknowledge the potentialities and limitations of artificial intelligence in the specific area of project management by doing a systematic literature review with which it was possible to analyse and correlate the selected articles and reach some patterns and tendencies. In the end it was clear the increased interest in the scientific community in this field, although with some areas to explore.A gestão de projetos é uma área comum a muitos setores e não está imune às inovações que a inteligência artificial está promovendo no mundo. Ainda assim a aplicação da inteligência artificial ainda não está muito difundida nas empresas e principalmente não em todas as áreas de gestão de projetos. As razões não são claras, mas aparentam estar relacionadas com a incerteza da aplicação da inteligência artificial na gestão de projetos. O objetivo foi entender as potencialidades e limitações da inteligência artificial na área específica de gestão de projetos por meio de uma revisão sistemática da literatura com a qual seja possível analisar e correlacionar os artigos selecionados e obter eventualmente alguns padrões e tendências. No final ficou claro que há um crescente interesse da comunidade científica por esta área, embora com alguns âmbitos por explorar

Digital technologies and public policies applied to green cities

Digital technologies and public policies are fundamental for cities in defining their urban greening strategies, and the main goal of this research is to identify the applied digital technologies and the public policy dimensions implemented at the national level by the member states to promote urban greening in the literature and official documents. The methodology used is a systematic literature review (based on international studies), a Delphi study with experts, and a policy analysis, aiming to understand how the Portuguese government has implemented policies and identify the main technologies applied to urban greening. The main findings regard (i) the focus on the interaction between actors in policymaking; (ii) interpretive approaches used to examine the application of technologies in urban greening problems; and (iii) how policies reflect the social construction of ‘problems’. The research focuses on how policy analysis provides a powerful tool that can be used to understand the technologies, actions, interests, and political contexts underpinning policy decisions. The main lessons learned from this research are that urban greening can benefit urban centers together with the non-urban environment on which they have a functional impact, such as agricultural hinterland areas, forest spaces around the cities, and the rural–urban interfaces. Initiatives for urban greening are designed to enhance cross-border coordination, complementarities, flexibility, productivity, and access to the main international markets and territories.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Systematic literature review: Integration of additive manufacturing and industry 4.0

The research trend in additive manufacturing (AM) has evolved over the past 30 years, from patents, advances in the design, and layer-by-layer materials, to technologies. However, this evolution is faced with some barriers, such as the implementation of additive manufacturing (AM) in operations, its productivity limitations, and economic and social sustainability. These barriers need to be overcome in order to realize the full potential of AM. The objective of this study is to analyze the bibliometric data on these barriers through a systematic review in two study areas: business model innovation and sustainability in AM from Industry 4.0 perspective. Using the most common keywords in these two study areas, we performed a search on the Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus databases and filtered the results using some inclusion and exclusion criteria. A bibliometric analysis was performed for authorship productivity, journals, the most common keywords, and the identified research clusters in the study areas. For the bibliometric analysis, the BIBEXCEL software was used to extract the relevant information, and Bibliometrix was used to determine the research trend over the past few years. Finally, a literature review was performed to identify future trends in the study areas. The analysis showed evidence of the relationship between the study areas from a bibliometric perspective and areas related to AM as an enabler for Industry 4.0