Investigating the Perceived Human Errors in 4D-BIM Construction Scheduling

Four-dimensional building information modeling (4D-BIM or 4D Scheduling) is well known to benefit the construction industry in many ways. 4D-BIM is an effective scheduling technique which integrates traditional scheduling methods and advanced visualization of the construction sequences in a 3D environment. Despite the potential benefits of 4D-BIM to improve scheduling quality, errors still often occur in construction schedules. The objective of this research is to understand the association between human errors and computer-aided scheduling. This paper focuses on examining the current practices of 4D-scheduling to gain insights on potential errors during the process of scheduling. Furthermore, the paper discusses a set of root causes of scheduling errors based on different types of human errors in cognition error theories. The research determined human errors through an integrated approach of literature review and a survey. The results of this study are expected to provide new knowledge about what human errors that commonly occur during the scheduling processing using BIM and their root causes. This study also discusses a few error reduction/prevention methods that can help BIM practitioners, schedulers, organizations to avoid perceived human errors during 4D-BIM work process

Librarians as Knowledge Mangers

An overall view of knowledge management, and the role of librarians in its implementation are being discussed. The shift from traditional work culture to a learning organization cannot be accomplished quickly. It requires high-level commitment to change, a rewards system that encourages teamwork, and the sharing of best practices. The main idea of knowledge management is establishing an environment where information is shared and openly accepted. To built an effective knowledge management system, the knowledge system needs to work according to the work flow of the respective organization, and should be able to produce the relevant information to the ongoing projects in the organization. At the completion of the project, the system is able to produce key documentation, lessons learned and other useful information to be stored and disseminated for future use. Corporations want knowledge management because they realize it has the potential to help them use what they already know, and what they don’t know, to work smarter and quicker and to make more money. Librarians have significant advantages as knowledge management players and they are both effective and customer oriented, secondly, they understand the ways in which people communicate information needs. Thus, librarians as knowledge managers can provide value-added information to their user community by using knowledge management tools in their system

Adequately Generating Captions for an Image Using Adaptive and Global Attention Mechanisms.

Generating description to images is a recent surge and with latest developments in the field of Artificial Intelligence, it can be one of the prominent applications to bridge the gap between Computer vision and Natural language processing fields. In terms of the learning curve, Deep learning has become the main backbone in driving many new applications. Image Captioning is one such application where the usage of Deep learning methods enhanced the performance of the captioning accuracy. The introduction of the Encoder-Decoder framework was a breakthrough in Image captioning. But as the sequences got longer the performance of captions was affected. To overcome this the usage of the attention mechanism as an extension to the Encoder- Decoder framework became an upward trend. Where an Attention mechanism generates a context vector having calculated information of pixels and using this information the decoder focuses on a particular region of an image and generates caption. Researchers proposed various attention mechanisms to generate a context vector having calculated information of image pixels. Luong et al. (2015) are one such who proposed a Global attention mechanism that makes a decoder look at the calculated pixels of the image at each time step while generating the caption. Similarly, an attention mechanism named Adaptive attention was proposed by Lu et al. (2017) which allows the decoder to decide whether the calculated pixels of an image need to be focused at each time step or needs to concentrate on a language model. This research proposes a comparative study of these two attention mechanisms in the generation of captions for images using the Flickr30k dataset. A deep Residual Network with 152 layers (ResNet-152) is used as an encoder and an LSTM is used as the decoder. An evaluation of the model is performed using BLEU, METEOR, ROUGE, CIDEr metrics and results show the usage of Adaptive attention over Global attention would yield better metric scores

Expert System for Group Technology

An expert system for solving group technology (GT) problems has been developed, considering simplified models of industrial GT problems. It solves problems of varying characteristics using in-built algorithms, namely average linkage clustering algorithms (ALC), cluster identification algorithms (CI) and generalised p-median model. Depending upon the characteristics of GT problem, a suitable algorithm is selected. The algorithm takes the required inputs for the problem and gives the output, which consists of machine cells with corresponding part families and the bottleneck parts, if any

Stability results for constrained dynamical systems

Differential-Algebraic Equations (DAE) provide an appropriate framework to model and analyse dynamic systems with constraints. This framework facilitates modelling of the system behaviour through natural physical variables of the system, while preserving the topological constraints of the system. The main purpose of this dissertation is to investigate stability properties of two important classes of DAEs. We consider some special cases of Linear Time Invariant (LTI) DAEs with control inputs and outputs, and also a special class of Linear switched DAEs. In the first part of the thesis, we consider LTI systems, where we focus on two properties: passivity and a generalization of passivity and small gain theorems called mixed property. These properties play an important role in the control design of large-scale interconnected systems. An important bottleneck for a design based on the aforementioned properties is their verification. Hence we intend to develop easily verifiable conditions to check passivity and mixedness of Single Input Single Output (SISO) and Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) DAEs. For linear switched DAEs, we focus on the Lyapunov stability and this problem forms the basis for the second part of the thesis. In this part, we try to find conditions under which there exists a common Lyapunov function for all modes of the switched system, thus guaranteeing exponential stability of the switched system. These results are primarily developed for continuous-time systems. However, simulation and control design of a dynamic system requires a discrete-time representation of the system that we are interested in. Thus, it is critical to establish whether discrete-time systems, inherit fundamental properties of the continuous-time systems from which they are derived. Hence, the third part of our thesis is dedicated to the problems of preserving passivity, mixedness and Lyapunov stability under discretization. In this part, we examine several existing discretization methods and find conditions under which they preserve the stability properties discussed in the thesis

Stability results for constrained dynamical systems

Differential-Algebraic Equations (DAE) provide an appropriate framework to model and analyse dynamic systems with constraints. This framework facilitates modelling of the system behaviour through natural physical variables of the system, while preserving the topological constraints of the system. The main purpose of this dissertation is to investigate stability properties of two important classes of DAEs. We consider some special cases of Linear Time Invariant (LTI) DAEs with control inputs and outputs, and also a special class of Linear switched DAEs. In the first part of the thesis, we consider LTI systems, where we focus on two properties: passivity and a generalization of passivity and small gain theorems called mixed property. These properties play an important role in the control design of large-scale interconnected systems. An important bottleneck for a design based on the aforementioned properties is their verification. Hence we intend to develop easily verifiable conditions to check passivity and mixedness of Single Input Single Output (SISO) and Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) DAEs. For linear switched DAEs, we focus on the Lyapunov stability and this problem forms the basis for the second part of the thesis. In this part, we try to find conditions under which there exists a common Lyapunov function for all modes of the switched system, thus guaranteeing exponential stability of the switched system. These results are primarily developed for continuous-time systems. However, simulation and control design of a dynamic system requires a discrete-time representation of the system that we are interested in. Thus, it is critical to establish whether discrete-time systems, inherit fundamental properties of the continuous-time systems from which they are derived. Hence, the third part of our thesis is dedicated to the problems of preserving passivity, mixedness and Lyapunov stability under discretization. In this part, we examine several existing discretization methods and find conditions under which they preserve the stability properties discussed in the thesis