Requirements for building information modeling based lean production management systems for construction

Smooth flow of production in construction is hampered by disparity between individual trade teams' goals and the goals of stable production flow for the project as a whole. This is exacerbated by the difficulty of visualizing the flow of work in a construction project. While the addresses some of the issues in Building information modeling provides a powerful platform for visualizing work flow in control systems that also enable pull flow and deeper collaboration between teams on and off site. The requirements for implementation of a BIM-enabled pull flow construction management software system based on the Last Planner System™, called ‘KanBIM’, have been specified, and a set of functional mock-ups of the proposed system has been implemented and evaluated in a series of three focus group workshops. The requirements cover the areas of maintenance of work flow stability, enabling negotiation and commitment between teams, lean production planning with sophisticated pull flow control, and effective communication and visualization of flow. The evaluation results show that the system holds the potential to improve work flow and reduce waste by providing both process and product visualization at the work face

Seeing the invisible: from imagined to virtual urban landscapes

Urban ecosystems consist of infrastructure features working together to provide services for inhabitants. Infrastructure functions akin to an ecosystem, having dynamic relationships and interdependencies. However, with age, urban infrastructure can deteriorate and stop functioning. Additional pressures on infrastructure include urbanizing populations and a changing climate that exposes vulnerabilities. To manage the urban infrastructure ecosystem in a modernizing world, urban planners need to integrate a coordinated management plan for these co-located and dependent infrastructure features. To implement such a management practice, an improved method for communicating how these infrastructure features interact is needed. This study aims to define urban infrastructure as a system, identify the systematic barriers preventing implementation of a more coordinated management model, and develop a virtual reality tool to provide visualization of the spatial system dynamics of urban infrastructure. Data was collected from a stakeholder workshop that highlighted a lack of appreciation for the system dynamics of urban infrastructure. An urban ecology VR model was created to highlight the interconnectedness of infrastructure features. VR proved to be useful for communicating spatial information to urban stakeholders about the complexities of infrastructure ecology and the interactions between infrastructure features.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2019.102559Published versio

Augmenting citation chain aggregation with article maps

Presentation slides available at: https://www.gesis.org/fileadmin/upload/kmir2014/paper4_slides.pdfThis paper presents Voyster, an experimental system that combines citation chain aggregation (CCA) and spatial-semantic maps to support citation search. CCA uses a three-list view to represent the citation network surrounding a ‘pearl’ of known relevant articles, whereby cited and citing articles are ranked according to number of pearl relations. As the pearl grows, this overlap score provides an effective proxy for relevance. However, when the pearl is small or multi-faceted overlap ranking provides poor discrimination. To address this problem we augment the lists with a visual map, wherein articles are organized according to their content similarity. We demonstrate how the article map can help the user to make relevant choices during the early stages of the search pro-cess and also provide useful insights into the thematic structure of the local citation network

Sharing practice, problems and solutions for institutional change

This chapter critiques the roles of different forms of representation of practice as part of an institutional change process. It discusses how these representations can be used both to design and to share learning activities at the various levels of decision-making in a university. We illustrate our arguments with empirical data gathered on change processes associated with an institution-wide change programme: the introduction of a new virtual learning environment (VLE). In particular, we describe a case study of the introduction of the VLE tools in a business course. We focus on two particular forms of representations to describe the essence of the innovation: a pedagogical pattern and a visual learning design. We argue that pedagogical patterns and learning design have emerged as parallel approaches to describing practice in recent years. Despite their very different origins, both provide complementary representations, which emphasize different aspects of the practice being described. We are attempting to combine these approaches. We briefly outline the Open University Learning Design initiative, of which this work is part, and describe its key underpinning philosophies. We believe our approach provides a vehicle for enabling a better articulation of design principles and the discussion of issues concerning the re-use of educational resources and activities

Trust in ICT-Based New Product Development - Guidelines for Virtual New Product Development Teams

The traditional process of new product development is focusing on an intra-organizational workflow, which should - in its ideal form - be done by virtual interdisciplinary teams. Team members should be from several departments like manufacturing, research & development, sales and marketing. But innovation is happening more and more in networks of companies, clusters or so called network companies. The following article delivers a framework of guidelines for virtual team management in order to improve the success of innovation strategies.e-collaboration, virtual team work, new product development, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

A sequential analysis of procedural meeting communication: How teams facilitate their meetings

How do teams facilitate their own meetings? Unmanaged (or free) social interaction often leads to poor decision-making, unnecessary conformity, social loafing, and ineffective communication processes, practices, and products. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the potential benefits of procedural communication in team meetings. The role of procedural communication, defined as verbal behaviors that structure group discussion to facilitate goal accomplishment, was examined in 59 team meetings from 19 organizations. Meeting behaviors were videotaped and coded. Lag sequential analysis revealed that procedural meeting behaviors are sustained by supporting statements within the team interaction process. They promote proactive communication (e.g., who will do what and when) and significantly inhibit dysfunctional meeting behaviors (e.g., losing the train of thought, criticizing others, and complaining). These patterns were found both at lag1 and lag2. Furthermore, the more evenly distributed procedural meeting behaviors were across team members, the more team members were satisfied with their discussion processes and outcomes. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed

Using data analytics for collaboration patterns in distributed software team simulations: the role of dashboards in visualizing global software development patterns

This paper discusses how previous work on global software development learning teams is extended with the introduction of data analytics. The work is based on several years of studying student teams working in distributed software team simulations. The scope of this paper is twofold. First it demonstrates how data analytics can be used for the analysis of collaboration between members of distributed software teams. Second it describes the development of a dashboard to be used for the visualization of various types of information in relation to Global Software Development (GSD). Due to the nature of this work, and the need for continuous pilot studies, simulations of distributed software teams have been created with the participation of learners from a number of institutions. This paper discusses two pilot studies with the participation of six institutions from two different countries

A Microservice Infrastructure for Distributed Communities of Practice

Non-formal learning in Communities of Practice (CoPs) makes up a significant portion of today’s knowledge gain. However, only little technological support is tailored specifically towards CoPs and their particular strengths and challenges. Even worse, CoPs often do not possess the resources to host or even develop a software ecosystem to support their activities. In this paper, we describe a distributed, microservice-based Web infrastructure for non-formal learning in CoPs. It mitigates the need for central infrastructures, coordination or facilitation and takes into account the constant change of these communities. As a real use case, we implement an inquiry-based learning application on-top of our infrastructure. Our evaluation results indicate the usefulness of this learning application, which shows promise for future work in the domain of community-hosted, microservice-based Web infrastructures for learning outside of formal settings