Building the future: integrating building information management and environmental assessment methodologies

The demand for sustainable buildings is increasing driven in part by legislation, rising energy costs and growing environmental concerns amongst consumers. As a result clients and developers are increasingly seeking to incorporate environmental attributes into buildings and demonstrate these sustainability credentials by certifying a development using an environmental assessment methodology such as BREEAM or LEED. One of the major issues in delivering sustainable buildings is ensuring that measures incorporated into a building at design stage are translated into action during building construction. This disconnect between design and construction phases of a project often results in the need to undertake costly remedial measures to achieve a targeted sustainability rating, or the building failing the assessment. This paper suggests that by integrating BIM with Environmental Assessment Methodologies decisions made with regard to sustainability attributes at the design stage can be clearly communicated and understood by all involved in the buildings specification and construction. It introduces a conceptual framework that seeks to define the relationship between BIM and EAMs

Sustainable Jobs in Sustainable Energy : closing the gap

The surge in demand for renewable energy has seen the sector expand in recent years. Evidence of this in the North East is the recent establishment of an R&D centre (New and Renewable Energy Centre NaREC). However, the North East, even with its strong engineering background, has not had a successful rate of growth due particularly to skill deficiencies (CURDS 2002; GO 2004). This project investigated higher-level skill needs in the sector and gives recommendations on integrating the findings into the University curricula. In particular it recommends change in the area of mechanical and electrical engineering, which covers a wide range of renewable energy employment needs through its HND, degree and Masters programmes

CAST – City analysis simulation tool: an integrated model of land use, population, transport and economics

The paper reports on research into city modelling based on principles of Science of Complexity. It focuses on integration of major processes in cities, such as economics, land use, transport and population movement. This is achieved using an extended Cellular Automata model, which allows cells to form networks, and operate on individual financial budgets. There are 22 cell types with individual processes in them. The formation of networks is based on supply and demand mechanisms for products, skills, accommodation, and services. Demand for transport is obtained as an emergent property of the system resulting from the network connectivity and relevant economic mechanisms. Population movement is a consequence of mechanisms in the housing and skill markets. Income and expenditure of cells are self-regulated through market mechanisms and changing patterns of land use are a consequence of collective interaction of all mechanisms in the model, which are integrated through emergence

Criminal Procedure: Negligent Suppression of Evidence as Ground for New Trial in Federal Criminal Proceedings

Självkompakterande betong (SKB) eller som den också kallas vibreringsfri betong upptäcktes och utvecklades i Japan i slutet av 1980- talet. Anledningen till detta utvecklingsarbete var att betong gjutning väldigt kämpigt och tillgången på erfarna betongarbetare började bli låg. I Sverige använde man självkompakterande betong året 1993 som tekniken hämtades hem av CBI Betonginstitutet. Användning av självkompakterande betong leder till många fördelar som skiljer sig från den vanliga betongen avseende arbetsmiljö t.ex. slipper man vibrering och undviker tungt arbete som i konsekvens minskar antal skador på arbetsplatsen. Utöver detta ger SKB förkortad arbetstid, bättre utförande och möjlighet till arbetskraftbesparing. Sedan 1997 har Sverige ökat användning av SKB i platsgjutning medan andra länder som Danmark har gått fram till ca 30 % av sin platsgjutning. Den låga användningen beror på att självkompakterande betong är väldigt känslig och dyrare eftersom den innehåller mer tillsatsmaterial. Huvuddelen av projektet bestod av att ställa frågor till experter i byggbranschen om självkompakterande betong för att få största möjliga mängd av informationer. Informationer som vi har fått var emellan åtta besök och sex mail. Syftet med examensarbete är att öka kunskap om orsaken till låg utveckling av SKB på platsgjutning och kunskap om arbetsmiljö. Vidare syftar arbetet till att lyfta fram de arbetsmiljömässiga och konstruktiva fördelarna samt sprida information om dessa. Informationerna visar att anledningen till den låga användningen av SKB framför allt är priset.  Men tidigare misslyckanden och varierande betongegenskaper är också en av anledningarna. Genom att öka användning av SKB där man många fördelar bland annat ekonomisk vinst på lång sikt och framför allt bättre arbetsmiljö med tanke på samhället.Self-compacting concrete (SCC) or vibrated concrete was invented and developed in Japan in the late 1980's. Working with concrete is very hard and all of that is because of injuries that come from using of the usual concrete.  In Sweden, they used self-compacting concrete since 1993 when the technology has brought to Sweden from Japan by the Swedish cement and concrete Research institute. Self-compacting concrete has many advantages that are different from the traditional concrete according to the work environment which include avoidance of vibration and heavy work and all these can reduce the number of injuries at workplace. Shortened construction time and possibilities to save manpower are additional benefits. Today, self-compacting concrete is used for about 10 % on site casting in Sweden. Many other countries have gone forward in using of SCC, Denmark uses about 30%. The low use is due to the sensitivity of SCC and expensive because it contains more filler. The main work of the project consists of the interviews with the related persons in the building branch and questions to them about self-compacting concrete to get the maximum amount of information. Information that we have received was between eight visits and six mail. The aim of the thesis is to increase knowledge about the cause of the low development of SCC in place casting and knowledge of the work environment. Furthermore, this work aims to highlight the work environment and constructive advantages and disseminate information about them. The study shows that the reason for the low use of SCC is especially the price. But the previous failures and varying concrete properties are also such of these reasons. Increasing the use of SCC leads to many benefits including economic profit in the long term, and especially from the society side

Enhancing the performance of Decoupled Software Pipeline through Backward Slicing

The rapidly increasing number of cores available in multicore processors does not necessarily lead directly to a commensurate increase in performance: programs written in conventional languages, such as C, need careful restructuring, preferably automatically, before the benefits can be observed in improved run-times. Even then, much depends upon the intrinsic capacity of the original program for concurrent execution. The subject of this paper is the performance gains from the combined effect of the complementary techniques of the Decoupled Software Pipeline (DSWP) and (backward) slicing. DSWP extracts threadlevel parallelism from the body of a loop by breaking it into stages which are then executed pipeline style: in effect cutting across the control chain. Slicing, on the other hand, cuts the program along the control chain, teasing out finer threads that depend on different variables (or locations). parts that depend on different variables. The main contribution of this paper is to demonstrate that the application of DSWP, followed by slicing offers notable improvements over DSWP alone, especially when there is a loop-carried dependence that prevents the application of the simpler DOALL optimization. Experimental results show an improvement of a factor of ?1.6 for DSWP + slicing over DSWP alone and a factor of ?2.4 for DSWP + slicing over the original sequential code

Performance evaluation for high speed vehicle in VANET

Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) is a high dynamic emerging technology for supporting wireless communication among vehicles. Communication via routing packets over the high-speed vehicles is a challenging task. Vehicles mobility speed can varies depending on the road specification. However in highways speed can be increased up to 120 – 200 Km/hr. moving in high speed can affect the efficiency of data delivery. In particular V2I traffic where moving car trying to deliver data to fixed space units which are designed to collected and process data from vehicles. In this paper, we investigated the consequences on increasing vehicle mobility speed in term of data delivery evaluation metrics including network throughput, delay and packet delivery ration. Results shows that in high speed mobility VANET, network throughput it decreased, and packet delivery ration is decreased as well

Classification of Human Ventricular Arrhythmia in High Dimensional Representation Spaces

We studied classification of human ECGs labelled as normal sinus rhythm, ventricular fibrillation and ventricular tachycardia by means of support vector machines in different representation spaces, using different observation lengths. ECG waveform segments of duration 0.5-4 s, their Fourier magnitude spectra, and lower dimensional projections of Fourier magnitude spectra were used for classification. All considered representations were of much higher dimension than in published studies. Classification accuracy improved with segment duration up to 2 s, with 4 s providing little improvement. We found that it is possible to discriminate between ventricular tachycardia and ventricular fibrillation by the present approach with much shorter runs of ECG (2 s, minimum 86% sensitivity per class) than previously imagined. Ensembles of classifiers acting on 1 s segments taken over 5 s observation windows gave best results, with sensitivities of detection for all classes exceeding 93%.Comment: 9 pages, 2 tables, 5 figure

Data Quality Management in Large-Scale Cyber-Physical Systems

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) are cross-domain, multi-model, advance information systems that play a significant role in many large-scale infrastructure sectors of smart cities public services such as traffic control, smart transportation control, and environmental and noise monitoring systems. Such systems, typically, involve a substantial number of sensor nodes and other devices that stream and exchange data in real-time and usually are deployed in uncontrolled, broad environments. Thus, unexpected measurements may occur due to several internal and external factors, including noise, communication errors, and hardware failures, which may compromise these systems quality of data and raise serious concerns related to safety, reliability, performance, and security. In all cases, these unexpected measurements need to be carefully interpreted and managed based on domain knowledge and computational models. Therefore, in this research, data quality challenges were investigated, and a comprehensive, proof of concept, data quality management system was developed to tackle unaddressed data quality challenges in large-scale CPSs. The data quality management system was designed to address data quality challenges associated with detecting: sensor nodes measurement errors, sensor nodes hardware failures, and mismatches in sensor nodes spatial and temporal contextual attributes. Detecting sensor nodes measurement errors associated with the primary data quality dimensions of accuracy, timeliness, completeness, and consistency in large-scale CPSs were investigated using predictive and anomaly analysis models via utilising statistical and machine-learning techniques. Time-series clustering techniques were investigated as a feasible mean for detecting long-segmental outliers as an indicator of sensor nodes’ continuous halting and incipient hardware failures. Furthermore, the quality of the spatial and temporal contextual attributes of sensor nodes observations was investigated using timestamp analysis techniques. The different components of the data quality management system were tested and calibrated using benchmark time-series collected from a high-quality, temperature sensor network deployed at the University of East London. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the proposed data quality management system was evaluated using a real-world, large-scale environmental monitoring network consisting of more than 200 temperature sensor nodes distributed around London. The data quality management system achieved high accuracy detection rate using LSTM predictive analysis technique and anomaly detection associated with DBSCAN. It successfully identified timeliness and completeness errors in sensor nodes’ measurements using periodicity analysis combined with a rule engine. It achieved up to 100% accuracy in detecting potentially failed sensor nodes using the characteristic-based time-series clustering technique when applied to two days or longer time-series window. Timestamp analysis was adopted effectively for evaluating the quality of temporal and spatial contextual attributes of sensor nodes observations, but only within CPS applications in which using gateway modules is possible

The application of BIM tools to explore the dynamic characteristics of smart materials in a contemporary Shanashil building design element

Traditional architecture is known for its crafted facade features that respond to environmental, social and cultural requirements. Contemporary architecture produced façade features that attempted to enhance local design identity and local culture. Despite the advantages of modern technology, architectural elements have difficulties in fulfilling the idea of sustainable elegance that once traditional elements provided. This problem calls for an interdisciplinary design approach to deliver sustainable design solutions that positively adapt to the surrounding environment as well as maintain the state of elegance in design. With this in mind, the research aims to explore the role of new glass technologies to improve the performance and at the same time maintain the design value of traditional façade element “shanashil” in Baghdadi buildings. This research utilises BIM tools and uses smart materials to restore the lost value in design, which mimics the dynamic characteristics observed in nature, inspired by biomimetics strategies. Such qualities are found in the characteristics of smart dynamic glazing material particularly in the switchable, reversible properties of transparency and coloration efficiency. The material characteristics are attached to a 3D digital prototype to visualise the difference between dynamic and static properties through the use of technology tools Revit plugin and smart glazing virtual reality prototype. This research concludes that the dynamic characteristics of smart glazing materials are effective in delivering a multifunctional design quality to collectively blend in harmony with the surrounding environment

Recent development in XML-IR

The Web is characterized by a huge amount of heterogeneous data sources, which have different media support and format representation. Because XML can represent files of different formats, it can play an important role in IR since it is becoming a standard form for data representation and exchange over the Web. Under this assumption, the problem of querying heterogeneous sources can be reduced to the problem of querying XML data sources. This paper shows the influence of XML on the IR techniques and methodologies during the last five years through serving over 400 papers published in different conferences and journals