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

Usability dimensions in collaborative GIS

Collaborative GIS requires careful consideration of the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Usability aspects, given the variety of users that are expected to use these systems, and the need to ensure that users will find the system effective, efficient, and enjoyable. The chapter explains the link between collaborative GIS and usability engineering/HCI studies. The integration of usability considerations into collaborative GIS is demonstrated in two case studies of Web-based GIS implementation. In the first, the process of digitising an area on Web-based GIS is improved to enhance the user's experience, and to allow interaction over narrowband Internet connections. In the second, server-side rendering of 3D scenes allows users who are not equipped with powerful computers to request sophisticated visualisation without the need to download complex software. The chapter concludes by emphasising the need to understand the users' context and conditions within any collaborative GIS project. © 2006, Idea Group Inc

The EnTrak system : supporting energy action planning via the Internet

Recent energy policy is designed to foster better energy efficiency and assist with the deployment of clean energy systems, especially those derived from renewable energy sources. To attain the envisaged targets will require action at all levels and effective collaboration between disparate groups (e.g. policy makers, developers, local authorities, energy managers, building designers, consumers etc) impacting on energy and environment. To support such actions and collaborations, an Internet-enabled energy information system called 'EnTrak' was developed. The aim was to provide decision-makers with information on energy demands, supplies and impacts by sector, time, fuel type and so on, in support of energy action plan formulation and enactment. This paper describes the system structure and capabilities of the EnTrak system

Prototyping Virtual Data Technologies in ATLAS Data Challenge 1 Production

For efficiency of the large production tasks distributed worldwide, it is essential to provide shared production management tools comprised of integratable and interoperable services. To enhance the ATLAS DC1 production toolkit, we introduced and tested a Virtual Data services component. For each major data transformation step identified in the ATLAS data processing pipeline (event generation, detector simulation, background pile-up and digitization, etc) the Virtual Data Cookbook (VDC) catalogue encapsulates the specific data transformation knowledge and the validated parameters settings that must be provided before the data transformation invocation. To provide for local-remote transparency during DC1 production, the VDC database server delivered in a controlled way both the validated production parameters and the templated production recipes for thousands of the event generation and detector simulation jobs around the world, simplifying the production management solutions.Comment: Talk from the 2003 Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003, 5 pages, 3 figures, pdf. PSN TUCP01

How blockchain impacts cloud-based system performance: a case study for a groupware communication application

This paper examines the performance trade-off when implementing a blockchain architecture for a cloud-based groupware communication application. We measure the additional cloud-based resources and performance costs of the overhead required to implement a groupware collaboration system over a blockchain architecture. To evaluate our groupware application, we develop measuring instruments for testing scalability and performance of computer systems deployed as cloud computing applications. While some details of our groupware collaboration application have been published in earlier work, in this paper we reflect on a generalized measuring method for blockchain-enabled applications which may in turn lead to a general methodology for testing cloud-based system performance and scalability using blockchain. Response time and transaction throughput metrics are collected for the blockchain implementation against the non-blockchain implementation and some conclusions are drawn about the additional resources that a blockchain architecture for a groupware collaboration application impose

Virtual R&D Teams: A potential growth of education-industry collaboration

Introduction: With the advent of the global economy and high-speed Internet, online collaboration is fast becoming the norm in education and industry 1. Information technology (IT) creates many new inter-relationships among businesses, expands the scope of industries in which a company must compete to achieve the competitive advantage. Information systems and technology allow companies to coordinate their activities in distant geographic locations 2. IT is providing the infrastructure necessary to support the development of new collaboration forms among industry and education. Virtual research and development (R&D) teams represent one such relational form, one that could revolutionize the workplace and provide organizations with unprecedented levels of flexibility and responsiveness 3-4

Bibliometric Maps of BIM and BIM in Universities: A Comparative Analysis

Building Information Modeling (BIM) is increasingly important in the architecture and engineering fields, and especially in the field of sustainability through the study of energy. This study performs a bibliometric study analysis of BIM publications based on the Scopus database during the whole period from 2003 to 2018. The aim was to establish a comparison of bibliometric maps of the building information model and BIM in universities. The analyzed data included 4307 records produced by a total of 10,636 distinct authors from 314 institutions. Engineering and computer science were found to be the main scientific fields involved in BIM research. Architectural design are the central theme keywords, followed by information theory and construction industry. The final stage of the study focuses on the detection of clusters in which global research in this field is grouped. The main clusters found were those related to the BIM cycle, including construction management, documentation and analysis, architecture and design, construction/fabrication, and operation and maintenance (related to energy or sustainability). However, the clusters of the last phases such as demolition and renovation are not present, which indicates that this field suntil needs to be further developed and researched. With regard to the evolution of research, it has been observed how information technologies have been integrated over the entire spectrum of internet of things (IoT). A final key factor in the implementation of the BIM is its inclusion in the curriculum of technical careers related to areas of construction such as civil engineering or architecture