Construction informatics in Turkey: strategic role of ICT and future research directions

Construction Informatics deals with subjects ranging from strategic management of ICTs to interoperability and information integration in the construction industry. Studies on defining research directions for Construction Informatics have a history over 20 years. The recent studies in the area highlight the priority themes for Construction Informatics research as interoperability, collaboration support, intelligent sites and knowledge sharing. In parallel, today it is widely accepted in the Architecture/Engineering/Construction (AEC) industry that ICT is becoming a strategic asset for any organisation to deliver business improvement and achieve sustainable competitive advantage. However, traditionally the AEC industry has approached investing in ICT with a lack of strategic focus and low level of priority to the business. This paper presents a recent study from Turkey that is focused on two themes. The first theme investigates the strategic role of ICT implementations from an industrial perspective, and explores if organisations within the AEC industry view ICT as a strategic resource for their business practice. The second theme investigates the ‘perspective of academia’ in terms of future research directions of Construction Informatics. The results of the industrial study indicates that ICT is seen as a value-adding resource, but a shift towards the recognition of the importance of ICT in terms of value adding in winning work and achieving strategic competitive advantage is observed. On the other hand, ICT Training is found to be the theme of highest priority from the academia point of view

WEB BASED 3D VISUALISATION OF TIME-VARYING AIR QUALITY INFORMATION

Many countries where the industrial development and production rates are high face many side effects of low air quality and air pollution. There is an evident correlation between the topographic and climatic properties of a location and the air pollution and air quality on that location. As the variation of air quality is dependent on location, air quality information should be acquired, utilised, stored and presented in form of Geo-Information. On the other hand, as this information is related with the health concerns of public, the information should be available publicly, and needs to be presented through an easily accessible medium and through a commonly used interface. Efficient storage of time-varying air quality information when combined with an efficient mechanism of 3D web-based visualisation would help very much in dissemination of air quality information to public. This research is focused on web-based 3D visualisation of time-varying air quality data. A web based interactive system is developed to visualise pollutant levels that were acquired as hourly intervals from more than 100 stations in Turkey between years 2008 and 2017. The research also concentrated on visualisation of geospatial high volume data. In the system, visualisation can be achieved on-demand by querying an air pollutant information database of 10.330.629 records and a city object database with more than 700.000 records. The paper elaborates on the details of this research. Following a background on air quality, air quality models, and Geo-Information visualisation, the system architecture and functionality is presented. The paper concludes with results of usability tests of the system

digital 3d control room for healthcare

The building process is in an evolutionary phase dictated by the constructive innovations and the digital revolution that has involved the tools and the technical and design contents of the entire life cycle of buildings. In this context, the operators of the sector need to develop organizational models capable of protecting and managing the conceptual and scale transition, between the conceptual framework of the architecture and the subsequent ones of construction, use and management. In the development of complex projects the elaboration of the organizational model is in fact fundamental to reach adequate figurative, performance and qualitative levels by incorporating the necessary contents of environmental, economic and management sustainability of buildings. This text illustrates the development of a horizontal organizational model for the smart and dynamic control of complex buildings through the creation of an innovative digital Web-Based platform capable of integrating Building Information Modeling (BIM) technology with a "Facility Management platform". The project involves experimentation applied to a real case involving the restructuring of a complex building

Impact analysis of accidents on the traffic flow based on massive floating car data

The wide usage of GPS-equipped devices enables the mass recording of vehicle movement trajectories describing the movement behavior of the traffic participants. An important aspect of the road traffic is the impact of anomalies, like accidents, on traffic flow. Accidents are especially important as they contribute to the the aspects of safety and also influence travel time estimations. In this paper, the impact of accidents is determined based on a massive GPS trajectory and accident dataset. Due to the missing precise date of the accidents in the data set used, first, the date of the accident is estimated based on the speed profile at the accident time. Further, the temporal impact of the accident is estimated using the speed profile of the whole day. The approach is applied in an experiment on a one month subset of the datasets. The results show that more than 72% of the accident dates are identified and the impact on the temporal dimension is approximated. Moreover, it can be seen that accidents during the rush hours and on high frequency road types (e.g. motorways, trunks or primaries) have an increasing effect on the impact duration on the traffic flow

Towards the implementation of building information models in geospatial context

The construction industry is very much fragmented and the concept ofinteroperability and integrated model based engineering is now becoming anindustrial need, to address the difficulties of information exchange at all stagesand between all parties involved in the construction life cycle. The lAI's IFC(common building information model standard) is now maturing in supportingthe various phases of the construction life cycle. In addition, the industry isbeginning to use geographic information systems (GISs) in various stages of theconstruction life cycle. Geospatial representations of building information modelscan be required when working with geographic information systems in theconstruction life cycle. On the other hand, geographic information systems arecommonly used information systems to plan and manage the urban builtenvironment. Some urban management tasks such as disaster management,delivery of goods and services, detailed cityscape visualisation require a highamount of geometrical and non-geometrical information about buildings. In fact,the lack of integration between Building Information Models and the GeospatialInformation Domain, creates a technological barrier to, automation of someindustrial processes in construction life cycle and urban management domains. Inorder to find a solution to this integration problem, this study aimed to assessthe applicability and benefits of an implementation of a building informationmodel in geospatial context. In light of the aim, the research assesses how atechnological innovation (an implementation of a building information model in ageospatial context) can improve the process in related areas of the constructionlife cycle and urban management domains.The research started with a background literature review that is concerned withthe trends and visions of construction information technology, in order todetermine the main research directions. Major industrial trends and visions of,computer integrated construction were investigated and, building and geospatialinformation modelling are selected as two main research directions. The nextphase of the background study aimed to investigate the building informationmodelling knowledge domain. In this context Standard for the Exchange ofProduct Model Data (STEP), STEP based methods for information exchange, fileand database implementations of STEP, STEP based building informationmodelling efforts, the structure of industry standard building information model-Industry Foundation Classes (IFC)-, several industrial projects that implementIFC model are investigated. The final stage of the background study investigatedthe modelling and management of geospatial information. This stage of theresearch started with investigating the role of geospatial information inconstruction and urban management knowledge domains. The researchcontinued with investigating the geospatial data modelling efforts in two andthree dimensions, and also looked at the use of three dimensional geospatia

Two design patterns for facilitating Building Information Model-based synchronous collaboration

The traditional fragmented nature of the construction industry along with the ad hoc matter in which investments in ICT have been made has resulted in a key cause of the poor performance and inefficiencies of the industry being attributed to the communication and exchange of information. The concept of Building Information Modelling (BIM) emerged to address the seamless exchange of information throughout the life of a facility following early modelling efforts focused on providing a solution to data exchange problems between several CAD and analysis systems. On the other hand, ICT supported collaborative teamwork has been an important aspect of building lifecycle management over the years in order to address the problems related to the fragmented nature of the industry. In parallel, recent studies in the field have demonstrated that BIMs will play an important role in facilitating collaboration. Most of the studies related to collaborative computing in construction have focused on facilitating the coordination and communication aspects of collaboration. In contrast, this paper proposes a system level and BIM-based approach for facilitating collaboration through the entire lifecycle of the building. In this context, the paper presents two design patterns that can be used as a foundation in formulating the design of information systems for BIM-based synchronous collaboration. The proposed patterns will help the system analysts/designers to focus on a system level picture when tackling recurring problems in the design of collaborative environments. Following a brief summary on the history of information modelling in the construction industry, this paper reviews the storage and exchange mechanisms of BIMs and then proposes two design patterns as a means to facilitating model-based synchronous collaboration