Is building construction, as a social project organization and production system, complicated or complex?

A recent study of chaos in construction as a project production process and system has raised a valid question: Is construction production really complex or just complicated? More importantly, how do we know which one is the best characterization of construction? The answer to these questions is developed through a systematic story of the following topic headings: Comprehensive literature search of complicated and complex key words; development of complexity theory and complexity science – similarities and differences; behavior of complex systems – as opposite to ordered (complicated) systems; construction as a system – product (object), organization and process (social systems); implication on the project execution; new approaches to project management. Understanding complexity in construction management is important for two reasons: (1) to visualize how both complicated and complex traits exist in a construction project (an object as well as a social systems), and (2) to identify for stakeholders new types of managerial competencies and tools that reflect the understanding of complexity in construction

ORGANIZATIONAL CYBERNETICS AS A METHODOLOGICAL PLATFORM FOR AUTHORSHIP AND AGENCY IN MANAGEMENT – REFLECTIONS ON A CASE STUDY OF ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE.

This paper explores the potential of a cybernetic methodology as a platform to facilitate authorship and agency through the review of the linear analysis of one intervention. This work suggests the use of the Viable System Model to induce awareness and the participative construction of a mental model and organizational discourse; aimed to facilitate the management function and the adaptation processes of the organization. Improvements in the decision-making process of the case study after the introduction of the VSM suggest its effectiveness for this purpose. Also, this research suggests a lack of well-documented meta-languages in management

Attention-controlled acquisition of a qualitative scene model for mobile robots

Haasch A. Attention-controlled acquisition of a qualitative scene model for mobile robots. Bielefeld (Germany): Bielefeld University; 2007.Robots that are used to support humans in dangerous environments, e.g., in manufacture facilities, are established for decades. Now, a new generation of service robots is focus of current research and about to be introduced. These intelligent service robots are intended to support humans in everyday life. To achieve a most comfortable human-robot interaction with non-expert users it is, thus, imperative for the acceptance of such robots to provide interaction interfaces that we humans are accustomed to in comparison to human-human communication. Consequently, intuitive modalities like gestures or spontaneous speech are needed to teach the robot previously unknown objects and locations. Then, the robot can be entrusted with tasks like fetch-and-carry orders even without an extensive training of the user. In this context, this dissertation introduces the multimodal Object Attention System which offers a flexible integration of common interaction modalities in combination with state-of-the-art image and speech processing techniques from other research projects. To prove the feasibility of the approach the presented Object Attention System has successfully been integrated in different robotic hardware. In particular, the mobile robot BIRON and the anthropomorphic robot BARTHOC of the Applied Computer Science Group at Bielefeld University. Concluding, the aim of this work, to acquire a qualitative Scene Model by a modular component offering object attention mechanisms, has been successfully achieved as demonstrated on numerous occasions like reviews for the EU-integrated Project COGNIRON or demos

Human-centered design of complex systems: An experience-based approach

This position paper presents a new approach based on my experience in the evolution of human-centered design (HCD) during four decades, and how it has struggled to become a discipline in its own right in complex socio-technical systems’ creation, development and operations. The 20th century saw tremendous industrial developments based on tangible materials that were transformed and assembled to make washing machines, cars, aircraft and power plants; during its last three decades, electronics and software were incrementally added to hardware machines. Operationalization issues moved from hardware to software, making automation and user interfaces central issues. From the beginning of the 21st century, we began to do the exact opposite! Currently, we typically start a project by designing and developing technology on computers, using software only, which is later transformed into hardware (and software). I denote this shift, the ‘socio-technical inversion’. Operationalization issues are moving from software to hardware, making tangibility a central issue. Three useful conceptual models are presented: the SFAC (Structure/Function versus Abstract/Concrete) model; the NAIR (Natural/Artificial versus Cognitive/Physical) model; and the AUTOS (Artifact, User, Task, Organization and Situation) pyramid. Concepts developed in this article are based on the rationalization of a long experience in the aerospace domain

Large space structures and systems in the space station era: A bibliography with indexes

Bibliographies and abstracts are listed for 1219 reports, articles, and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system between July 1, 1990 and December 31, 1990. The purpose is to provide helpful information to the researcher, manager, and designer in technology development and mission design according to system, interactive analysis and design, structural and thermal analysis and design, structural concepts and control systems, electronics, advanced materials, assembly concepts, propulsion, and solar power satellite systems

Embedded dynamic programming networks for networks-on-chip

PhD ThesisRelentless technology downscaling and recent technological advancements in three dimensional integrated circuit (3D-IC) provide a promising prospect to realize heterogeneous system-on-chip (SoC) and homogeneous chip multiprocessor (CMP) based on the networks-onchip (NoCs) paradigm with augmented scalability, modularity and performance. In many cases in such systems, scheduling and managing communication resources are the major design and implementation challenges instead of the computing resources. Past research efforts were mainly focused on complex design-time or simple heuristic run-time approaches to deal with the on-chip network resource management with only local or partial information about the network. This could yield poor communication resource utilizations and amortize the benefits of the emerging technologies and design methods. Thus, the provision for efficient run-time resource management in large-scale on-chip systems becomes critical. This thesis proposes a design methodology for a novel run-time resource management infrastructure that can be realized efficiently using a distributed architecture, which closely couples with the distributed NoC infrastructure. The proposed infrastructure exploits the global information and status of the network to optimize and manage the on-chip communication resources at run-time. There are four major contributions in this thesis. First, it presents a novel deadlock detection method that utilizes run-time transitive closure (TC) computation to discover the existence of deadlock-equivalence sets, which imply loops of requests in NoCs. This detection scheme, TC-network, guarantees the discovery of all true-deadlocks without false alarms in contrast to state-of-the-art approximation and heuristic approaches. Second, it investigates the advantages of implementing future on-chip systems using three dimensional (3D) integration and presents the design, fabrication and testing results of a TC-network implemented in a fully stacked three-layer 3D architecture using a through-silicon via (TSV) complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology. Testing results demonstrate the effectiveness of such a TC-network for deadlock detection with minimal computational delay in a large-scale network. Third, it introduces an adaptive strategy to effectively diffuse heat throughout the three dimensional network-on-chip (3D-NoC) geometry. This strategy employs a dynamic programming technique to select and optimize the direction of data manoeuvre in NoC. It leads to a tool, which is based on the accurate HotSpot thermal model and SystemC cycle accurate model, to simulate the thermal system and evaluate the proposed approach. Fourth, it presents a new dynamic programming-based run-time thermal management (DPRTM) system, including reactive and proactive schemes, to effectively diffuse heat throughout NoC-based CMPs by routing packets through the coolest paths, when the temperature does not exceed chip’s thermal limit. When the thermal limit is exceeded, throttling is employed to mitigate heat in the chip and DPRTM changes its course to avoid throttled paths and to minimize the impact of throttling on chip performance. This thesis enables a new avenue to explore a novel run-time resource management infrastructure for NoCs, in which new methodologies and concepts are proposed to enhance the on-chip networks for future large-scale 3D integration.Iraqi Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research (MOHESR)