20 research outputs found
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
Design patterns for BIM-based service-oriented architectures
Today Integrated Project Delivery together with Building Information Modeling is being realized as a process
of managing a project over a single shared information backbone. In the near future, Building Information
Models (BIMs) will be used as unique resources for enabling seamless data level interoperability, which
will greatly facilitate the processes in the Building Life Cycle. In this context, enabling the collaborative use
of BIMs is becoming essential and is much required by the industry for addressing the issues associated
with the poor efficiencies in Information Systems (IS) and productivity. On the other hand, in the new IS architectures,
service and resource orientation are becoming widely used, in terms of supporting collaboration
over distributed environments. This paper introduces three design patterns which will help in facilitating
BIM-based information sharing over the web, and web-based collaborative use of the BIMs. The patterns
were developed to formalize the approaches in interacting with the shared BIMs over the web. The first pattern
– BIM AJAX – explains how AJAX techniques can be used for supporting information retrieval from BIMs.
The second pattern – BIM SOAP Façade – provides a standard coarse-grained interface to reach multiple BIMs
over the web. The third pattern – RESTful BIM – elaborates on how BIM-based systems can benefit from the
REST (Resource Oriented) Architectures. The paper starts with providing an overview on Building Information
Models focusing on their characteristics and functions. Following this, the conventional approaches for
exchanging and sharing BIMs are presented. The third section elaborates on IS Integration, AJAX and Web
Services. Finally, three design patterns that have been developed are presented and discussed in detail.
© 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved
Multidimensional and Multiscale GIS
The advent of new data collection technologies, such as LiDAR and drones, have made geospatial data available in large amounts and at low costs. While access to data is getting easier, geospatial tools have to evolve towards further automation and guarantee the reproducibility of the process and the quality of the results. As such, algorithms and data structures for handling geospatial data also need to be more and more robust and efficient to model complex, multidimensional geospatial phenomena in GISystems and provide higher levels of analysis. Articles in this special issue address two complementary aspects of the problem. They introduce new algorithms and data structures that allow for a more efficient handling of multidimensional data but also present complete processing chains dealing with the integration and the dissemination of multidimensional data
Building Information Modelling: essentials and issues: The need to Integrate BIM and Geoinformation
In the construction industry, business relationships are often short-term and one-off. There are many unique processes and activities. The resulting complexity and fragmentation may obstruct quick and effective exchange and integration of information and thus hamper project progress. Building Information Modelling (BIM) aims at preventing mismatches in information exchange between the many stakeholders. Although BIM has come a long way in this respect, there are still challenges to overcome. The authors explain the essentials of BIM and discuss issues.Urban Data Scienc
3D Indoor Models and Their Applications
Indoor environments are often referred as to enclosed spaces. However, the general definition of space can already indicate that a space can be bounded. Wordnet (http://wordnet.priceton.edu) defines space as “an empty areas usually bounded in some way between things.”3D Geo-Informatio
A generative design-to-BIM workflow for minimum weight plane truss design
Structural design has a significant impact on the overall cost of truss structures. In order to reduce the cost of a structure it is important to support designers' decision making starting from the early design phase. In this study, an optimization workflow is proposed, developed and implemented using well known generative design and Building Information Modeling (BIM) tools to achieve a cost-optimal design of a truss structure in the early design phase. Generative design aims to develop products that are lighter, stronger, more efficient and tailored to the specific needs of end users. Generative design tools allow users to create efficient designs via optimizing factors such as cost, weight, energy efficiency and performance. The aim of this study was to develop an optimization workflow to find and model the minimum weight / minimum cost design alternative in the early design phase using generative design, structural analysis and BIM tools in an integrated manner. The goal for the optimization was determined as finding the minimum weight (thus minimum cost) structure among the generated design alternatives. The single span steel truss was selected as the structure to be optimized, and optimization scenarios were prepared and implemented to determine the structural components of the truss with minimum weight. The results demonstrated that through integrated use of structural analysis, generative design and BIM tools minimum-weight truss design can be realized easily and practically