Addressing information flow in lean production management and control in construction

Traditionally, production control on construction sites has been a challenging area, where the ad-hoc production control methods foster uncertainty - one of the biggest enemies of efficiency and smooth production flow. Lean construction methods such as the Last Planner System have partially tackled this problem by addressing the flow aspect through means such as constraints analysis and commitment planning. However, such systems have relatively long planning cycles to respond to the dynamic production requirements of construction, where almost daily if not hourly control is needed. New solutions have been designed by researchers to improve this aspect such as VisiLean, but again these types of software systems require the proximity and availability of computer devices to workers. Given this observation, there is a need for a communication system between the field and site office that is highly interoperable and provides real-time task status information. A High-level communication framework (using VisiLean) is presented in this paper, which aims to overcome the problems of system integration and improve the flow of information within the production system. The framework provides, among other things, generic and standardized interfaces to simplify the “push” and “pull” of the right (production) information, whenever needed, wherever needed, by whoever needs it. Overall, it is anticipated that the reliability of the production control will be improve

Global dynamic E-marketplaces, and their role in the internet-based economy

Collaboration capabilities are what will most probably create the gap between winners and losers in business-to-business (B2B) commerce. In this context, the electronic marketplace (EM) comes as a medium for trade and collaboration, and a common entry point where partners can share business processes and adopt a decentralized business model fuelled by market evolution. The thesis illustrates the advantages of collaborative business and presents the information technologies that support it. The purpose of this thesis is to educate both the author and the reader on the technology and infrastructure that supports collaborative business and to posit that among the three major information technology infrastructures that enable B2B commerce, the EM model provides significant advantages for individual companies and industries compared to Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and Peer-to-Peer (P2P). The thesis identifies key tools and value-added services EM\u27s should provide their participants to meet the requirements of modern companies and the Internet-based economy. Finally, the thesis suggests potential impacts of EM\u27s on the modern business ecosystem

State-of-the-art assessment on the implementations of international core data models for public administrations

Public administrations are often still organised in vertical, closed silos. The lack of common data standards (common data models and reference data) for exchanging information between administrations in a cross-domain and/or cross-border setting stands in the way of digital public services and automated flow of information between public administrations. Core data models address this issue, but are often created within the closed environment of a country or region and within one policy domain. A lack of insight exists in understanding and managing the life-cycle of these initiatives on public administration information systems for data modelling and data exchange. In this paper, we outline state-of-the-art implementations and vocabularies linked to the core data models. In particular we inventoried and selected existing core data models and identified tendencies in current practices based on the criteria creation, use, maintenance and coordination. Based on the analysis, this survey suggest research directions for policy and information management studies pointing to best practices regarding core data model implementations and their role in linking isolated data silos within a cross-country context. Finally we highlight the differences in their coordination and maintenance, depending on the state of creation and use

Dynamic Data Citation Service-Subset Tool for Operational Data Management

In earth observation and climatological sciences, data and their data services grow on a daily basis in a large spatial extent due to the high coverage rate of satellite sensors, model calculations, but also by continuous meteorological in situ observations. In order to reuse such data, especially data fragments as well as their data services in a collaborative and reproducible manner by citing the origin source, data analysts, e.g., researchers or impact modelers, need a possibility to identify the exact version, precise time information, parameter, and names of the dataset used. A manual process would make the citation of data fragments as a subset of an entire dataset rather complex and imprecise to obtain. Data in climate research are in most cases multidimensional, structured grid data that can change partially over time. The citation of such evolving content requires the approach of "dynamic data citation". The applied approach is based on associating queries with persistent identifiers. These queries contain the subsetting parameters, e.g., the spatial coordinates of the desired study area or the time frame with a start and end date, which are automatically included in the metadata of the newly generated subset and thus represent the information about the data history, the data provenance, which has to be established in data repository ecosystems. The Research Data Alliance Data Citation Working Group (RDA Data Citation WG) summarized the scientific status quo as well as the state of the art from existing citation and data management concepts and developed the scalable dynamic data citation methodology of evolving data. The Data Centre at the Climate Change Centre Austria (CCCA) has implemented the given recommendations and offers since 2017 an operational service on dynamic data citation on climate scenario data. With the consciousness that the objective of this topic brings a lot of dependencies on bibliographic citation research which is still under discussion, the CCCA service on Dynamic Data Citation focused on the climate domain specific issues, like characteristics of data, formats, software environment, and usage behavior. The current effort beyond spreading made experiences will be the scalability of the implementation, e.g., towards the potential of an Open Data Cube solution

Management of collaborative BIM data by the Federatinon of Distributed Models

The architecture engineering and construction sector is currently undergoing a significant period of change and modernization. In the United Kingdom in particular this is driven by the government’s objective of reducing the cost of construction projects. This is to be achieved by requiring all publicly funded projects to utilize fully collaborative building information modeling by 2016. A common goal in increasing building information model (BIM) adoption by the industry is the movement toward the realization of a BIM as either a single data model or a series of tightly coupled federated models. However, there are key obstacles to be overcome, including uncertainty over data ownership, concerns relating to the security/privacy of data, and reluctance to “outsource” data storage. This paper proposes a framework that is able to provide a solution for managing collaboration in the architecture engineering and construction (AEC) sector. The solution presented in this paper provides an overlay that automatically federates and governs distributed BIM data. The use of this overlay provides an integrated BIM model that is physically distributed across the stakeholders in a construction project. The key research question addressed by this paper is whether such an overlay can, by providing dynamic federation and governance of BIM data, overcome some key obstacles to BIM adoption, including questions over data ownership, the security/privacy of data, and reluctance to share data. More specifically, this paper provides the following contributions: (1) presentation of a vision for the implementation and governance of a federated distributed BIM data model; (2) description of the BIM process and governance model that underpins the approach; (3) provision of a validation case study using real construction data from a U.K. highways project, demonstrating that both the federated BIM overlay and the process and governance model are fit for purpose. - See more at: http://ascelibrary.org/doi/full/10.1061/(ASCE)CP.1943-5487.0000657#sthash.jIj574Lh.dpu