Support for energy-oriented design in the Australian context

There is a need for decision support tools that integrate energy simulation into early design in the context of Australian practice. Despite the proliferation of simulation programs in the last decade, there are no ready-to-use applications that cater specifically for the Australian climate and regulations. Furthermore, the majority of existing tools focus on achieving interaction with the design domain through model-based interoperability, and largely overlook the issue of process integration. This paper proposes an energy-oriented design environment that both accommodates the Australian context and provides interactive and iterative information exchanges that facilitate feedback between domains. It then presents the structure for DEEPA, an openly customisable system that couples parametric modelling and energy simulation software as a means of developing a decision support tool to allow designers to rapidly and flexibly assess the performance of early design alternatives. Finally, it discusses the benefits of developing a dynamic and concurrent performance evaluation process that parallels the characteristics and relationships of the design process

BIM adoption and implementation for architectural practices

Severe issues about data acquisition and management arise during the design creation and development due to complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity. BIM (Building Information Modelling) is a tool for a team based lean design approach towards improved architectural practice across the supply chain. However, moving from a CAD (Computer Aided Design) approach to BIM (Building Information Modelling) represents a fundamental change for individual disciplines and the construction industry as a whole. Although BIM has been implemented by large practices, it is not widely used by SMEs (Small and Medium Sized Enterprises). Purpose: This paper aims to present a systematic approach for BIM implementation for Architectural SMEs at the organizational level Design/Methodology/Approach: The research is undertaken through a KTP (Knowledge transfer Partnership) project between the University of Salford and John McCall Architects (JMA) a SME based in Liverpool. The overall aim of the KTP is to develop lean design practice through BIM adoption. The BIM implementation approach uses a socio-technical view which does not only consider the implementation of technology but also considers the socio-cultural environment that provides the context for its implementation. The action research oriented qualitative and quantitative research is used for discovery, comparison, and experimentation as it provides �learning by doing�. Findings: The strategic approach to BIM adoption incorporated people, process and technology equally and led to capacity building through the improvements in process, technological infrastructure and upskilling of JMA staff to attain efficiency gains and competitive advantages. Originality/Value: This paper introduces a systematic approach for BIM adoption based on the action research philosophy and demonstrates a roadmap for BIM adoption at the operational level for SME companie

Forum Session at the First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC03)

The First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC) was held in Trento, December 15-18, 2003. The focus of the conference ---Service Oriented Computing (SOC)--- is the new emerging paradigm for distributed computing and e-business processing that has evolved from object-oriented and component computing to enable building agile networks of collaborating business applications distributed within and across organizational boundaries. Of the 181 papers submitted to the ICSOC conference, 10 were selected for the forum session which took place on December the 16th, 2003. The papers were chosen based on their technical quality, originality, relevance to SOC and for their nature of being best suited for a poster presentation or a demonstration. This technical report contains the 10 papers presented during the forum session at the ICSOC conference. In particular, the last two papers in the report ere submitted as industrial papers

Microservice-Based Integration Framework for a Back-Office Solution

Dissertação de Mestrado em Engenharia InformáticaNot long ago, monolithic applications ruled among production servers – these applications had massive scopes which made them difficult to maintain, with constraints of libraries shared between modules and where every change or update is attached with big downtimes. To stray from this approach, enterprises chose to divide their big applications into smaller ones with fewer responsibilities, a clearer notion of boundaries and for the better part of it, more maintainable and scalable. The microservice approach allows enterprises to better divide themselves among teams that follow the full stack and spectrum of development in each application, from the persistence layer through the API and to the client, and from planning, through development to later support. The project exposed in this paper enlightens the scenario of an e-commerce platform’s back-office - where the implementation of a strangler pattern divided a large monolithic application into smaller microservices – leaving the door open for the integration of the multiple client applications to interconnect. The proposed solution intends to integrate the various systems of Jumia and take on this exposed opportunity, resorting to a microservice architecture and integration patterns with the objective of easing the flow of operations for processes that involve several management tools.Recentemente, o desenvolvimento de aplicações mudou à escala mundial, os sistemas distribuídos permitiram a introdução de um novo paradigma. Este paradigma baseia-se na redução de uma grande aplicação (monólito) em pequenos sub-módulos (micro-serviços) que comunicam perfeitamente entre si como se de uma única aplicação se tratasse. Este paradigma veio também refrescar as estruturas internas das empresas, ao distribuir os diversos serviços entre equipas, de forma a que cada uma delas esteja presente em todo o ciclo de vida das aplicações, desde o conceito até ao lançamento, passando pelo desenvolvimento e posterior manutenção e suporte da mesma. As mesmas equipas são também responsáveis por toda a stack que cada micro-serviço contém partindo da user interface (UI), passando por toda a API que contém a lógica de negócio até à camada de acesso de dados. Esta nova abordagem oferece algumas vantagens quando comparada com outras soluções disponíveis no mercado, tais como a liberdade de cada um dos serviços em ser desenvolvido nas tecnologias e linguagens que melhor se adequam ao seu propósito, sem que estejam presas a uma decisão tomada numa ocasião anterior para um propósito diferente ou a restrições de dependências incompatíveis entre si. Sendo que um dos principais problemas da computação distribuída é a possível indisponibilidade de cada um dos seus intervenientes, a arquitetura orientada a micro-serviços (microservice architecture, MSA) prevê que cada um dos seus serviços esteja contido no seu contexto (bounded context) e que disponha de todos os dados que lhe correspondem, desta forma a indisponibilidade de qualquer serviço não deve impactar o desempenho de nenhum dos seus pares. A reduzida dimensão de cada um destes serviços permite a existência de processos de deploy mais rápidos o que acaba por se refletir em downtimes mais reduzidos. Outra das vantagens da redução das dimensões e dos contextos de cada um dos serviços é a sua fácil manutenção, uma vez que o código se torna mais conciso e específico ao propósito que prevê cumprir. A modularidade dos micro-serviços permite-lhes também ajustar o número de réplicas de cada um deles de forma independente de acordo com as necessidades e previsões de volume de tráfego a cada momento. Apesar de todas as vantagens acima expostas, uma MSA traz consigo também alguns desafios tais como os testes de integração, debugging, deploying, retrocompatibilidade com outros serviços, entre outras abordadas em maior detalhe neste documento. O projeto exposto neste documento é um projeto proposto pela Jumia, uma empresa que disponibiliza uma plataforma de comércio online no continente africano. Esta plataforma está disponível em onze países africanos com mais de cem armazéns espalhados por todo o continente e que conta com mais de cinco mil colaboradores espalhados pelo mundo. Tal como muitas outras empresas no mercado a Jumia idealizou os seus processos de operações numa aplicação única que controlava todos os fluxos de negócio e continha em si toda a informação de armazenamento, produtos, entregas, pagamentos, encomendas entre outras. Rapidamente a aplicação de back-office da Jumia tornou-se insustentável e, tal como tinha sido executado noutras empresas do mesmo ramo, foi implementado um strangler pattern. Desta forma tornou-se possível fazer uma separação de dependências gradualmente, isolando cada um dos processos de negócio num serviço independente que persiste todos os dados necessários para a execução de cada uma das operações. No entanto, a implementação deste padrão deu origem a uma lacuna nos processos da empresa, uma vez que cada um dos serviços possui o seu user interface, algumas das operações requerem que os agentes de operações transitem entre aplicações, e necessitem de se autenticar novamente. Este processo acaba por ter impacto no fluxo de operações, refletindo-se no número de encomendas processadas e por consequência nas receitas da empresa. O presente documento pretende explorar a oportunidade de negócio proposta, assim como os mais essenciais padrões de integração de micro-serviços, de forma a apresentar uma solução que consiga colmatar a lacuna apresentada sem pôr em causa a segurança das aplicações e as normas de conformidade exigidas. Esta proposta foi elaborada através da conceção de uma arquitetura orientada a micro-serviços de forma coreografada tendo como objetivo ser integrada nas diversas aplicações de Back-Office com recurso a uma biblioteca importada através do gestor do Node Package Manager

Interoperability-based optimisation of architectural design

As a major contributor to the planetary greenhouse effect, construction industry needs to adopt sustainability at the core of its activities - to reverse or slow down the impacts of climate change. Increased collaboration among stakeholders along with analysis/performance based decision making is the way forward for enhanced sustainability. Emphasis is placed on the process of shared creation through multi-disciplinary collaboration, enabled by the implementation of IT (Information Technology) that acts as a platform to augment our ability to communicate. Developments in the Construction IT have been product oriented and aimed at solving particular domain problems usually with a narrow focus - further reducing the accessibility and interoperability of information over the lifecycle stages. Advances in the semantics based interoperable data standards, such as IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) offer significant advantage in removing such barriers to successful vertical and horizontal integration of software tools and process. The use of building simulation in architectural design requires specialist knowledge and a rich set of information about the proposed building which are not available to the design team at early stages. Standards based mapping of information for input processing of the simulation engines can act as an alternative to simplified tools supporting the exploratory nature of design. Detailed based input processing also restricts the use of simulation to occasional validation of solutions - even during detailed design stages. For a directed exploration of the solution space, numerical optimisation methods can be applied to enhance simulation assisted design. Successful application of optimisation methods pivots on the ability of the analysis and decision making components of the software to communicate with each other without the loss of data semantics. To realise this potential, a process-oriented integrated framework based on the interoperability of information and software tools have been developed and implemented in this thesis. For horizontal integration of domain specific tools through intra-software messaging, ardML - an XML (eXtensible Markup Language) based schema has been developed which attempts to connect non-interoperable software tools. Multi-disciplinary environmental design of buildings has been chosen as the domain of discourse. The framework currently employs industry standard zonal building simulation as an analysis tool and gradient-based mathematical optimisation methods for informed decision making. Interoperability among tools, processes and information has been achieved through the implementation of IFC based data model. The modular nature of the object-oriented framework allows incorporation of existing and future tools. The applicability of the framework has been investigated in the early stages of architectural design, in particular the selection of form and orientation - considering the environmental aspects. The implementation of the framework at an ambiguous and exploratory stage of design reinforces its applicability in a wider industry context

Networking high-end CAD systems based on PC/MS-DOS platforms

The concept of today\u27s technology has been dropped. Everything is now either oobsolete or experimental. Yesterday\u27s technology is appealing only because it is tried-and-true and prices are reduced for clearance. Tomorrow\u27s technology is exciting, somewhat expensive and not well tested. In the field of architecture, where most firms are medium or small, having limited resources, the high cost initially required for a CAD installation was generally impossible to meet not too many years ago. From spreadsheets and CAD graphics to network file systems and distributed database management, the basic systems and application tools have matured to the point that the possibilities are now limited mainly by how creatively the architects can apply them. CAD systems on the market today are not so different from the systems of the mid 70s, except they have gone from hardware costing a hundred thousand dollar to PC based systems, costing under ten thousand dollars. Choices of hardware and software for CAD systems undergo continual changes in power and efficiency. There will come a point where upgrading will create more a deficiency rather than an augmentation of capability efficiency and overall function. Thus it becomes a major problem for the prospect buyer