Integrated framework for early warning system in UAE

Purpose - The impacts and costs of natural disasters on people, properties and environment is often severe when they occur on a large scale and with no warning system in place. The lack of deployment of early warning system, low risk and hazard knowledge and impact of natural hazard experienced in some communities in the UAE h ave emphasised the need for more effective early warning systems. This work focuses on developing an integrated framework for early warning systems for communities prone to the impact of natural hazards, in order to reduce their vulnerability and improve emergency ma nagement arrangements in the UAE. Approach - The essential elements of effective Early Warning System (EWS) were identified through literature review to develop an integrated framework for EWS. Semi- structured interviews and questionnaires were also used to identify and confirm hindering factors to deployment of effective early warning systems in Abu Dhabi and Fujairah Emirates, while areas that require further development were also identified through this means. Findings and value - The outcome of this research revealed that the warning for natural hazards in the UAE lacked the required elements for effective early warning system, while the elements which are present are insufficient to mitigate the impacts of natural hazards. The information in this work emphasises the need to improve two elements, and to develop the other two essential elements of early warning system in the UAE

Eye of sustainable planning : a conceptual heritage-led urban regeneration planning framework

Implementation and integration of sustainable development within a management framework is the main problem of urban regeneration projects. Therefore, this paper aims to develop a sustainable heritage-led urban regeneration planning framework, which will act as an urban regeneration project life cycle model and aid sustainable planning and decision-making processes for project managers. First, a literature review is used to conceptualise the first version of the sustainable planning framework. Then, it is validated by conducting interviews with professionals in Northern Cyprus. Sustainable heritage-led urban regeneration planning problems exist in the case study region. Therefore, the data collected for this research is significant to the research problem. Results showed that there is a lack of knowledge towards heritage-led urban regeneration among the local community and it is the main source of sustainable planning problems. Therefore, a questionnaire survey is conducted to validate this problem. The results validated that there is a sustainability perception difference between the local community and professionals, and the knowledge level of the local community was not satisfactory. Finally, a knowledge management system is introduced in the final version of the framework in order to empower stakeholders, and the “eye of sustainable planning” is introduced. Perception differences between the local community and professionals and the lack of knowledge of the local community towards heritage-led urban regeneration is introduced by this research. This study is limited to heritage-led regeneration projects and future studies may extend the scope of this study to different countries

A road-map to personalized context-aware services delivery in construction

Existing mobile IT applications in the construction industry are constrained by their reliance on static methods of information delivery, which are often not appropriate to meet changing work demand resulting from dynamic project conditions. This paper focuses on a new interaction paradigm i.e. context-aware information delivery (CAID), which promises to make information provisioning more responsive to workers’ changing work demands. A roadmap to personalized CAID in construction is laid out, with a focus on creating a pervasive user-centred intelligent work environment capable of serving relevant information needs of busy construction professionals by intelligent interpretation of their context. Research approach includes use of scenario planning method. Face-to-face unstructured interviews were arranged with 28 industry and technology experts for scenario validation and provided input for the road-mapping exercise. The research demonstrates that the realisation of the CAID vision is within reach and will tremendously enhance the value proposition of mobile information technology in the construction industry. Context-relevant and personalised information delivery will save valuable time and has the potential to improve efficiency and productivity. It can make construction ICT applications and worker’s immediate work environment more responsive to work demands, thereby allowing better management of construction projects. A key challenge is to link various technology enabling elements with methodological, cultural, social and organisational aspects specific to the construction industry. This would require a multi-disciplinary approach requiring input from different fields, including computer science, ergonomics, social studies and the construction industry

Integrated elements of early warning systems to enhance disaster resilience in the Arab region

The Arab region’s coastal zones are of immense importance. Almost all Arab countries need to build up resilience for vulnerable communities and carry out proactive planning for integrated coastal zone management and development of early warning systems for vulnerable coastal areas. It is clear that through the analysis of past natural disasters, the links between the four elements (risk knowledge, monitoring and warning service, dissemination and communication, response capability) of EWS are weak, leading to a reduced effectiveness of the system. The focus is on the development of technology more than on members of the community at risk. There is also weakness in institutional cooperation and one of the main challenges is in early warning. This problem has encouraged the researcher to propose a guideline for early warning of natural disasters and increase its effectiveness by involving members of the community and improving institutional cooperation between stakeholders. The objective of this paper is to identify and assess some of the main areas vulnerable to sea level rise in the Arab world. A survey of case studies in the UAE (United Arab Emirates) and Egypt is undertaken. The main objectives are to identify vulnerabilities from coastal flooding, assess adaptation measures and point out the urgent need to build up institutional and human capacities in response to the problem. identify gaps, points of strength and points of weakness in early warning and discuss options for adaptation and the need for implementing major elements of the EWS

Intelligent agent for formal modelling of temporal multi-agent systems

Software systems are becoming complex and dynamic with the passage of time, and to provide better fault tolerance and resource management they need to have the ability of self-adaptation. Multi-agent systems paradigm is an active area of research for modeling real-time systems. In this research, we have proposed a new agent named SA-ARTIS-agent, which is designed to work in hard real-time temporal constraints with the ability of self-adaptation. This agent can be used for the formal modeling of any self-adaptive real-time multi-agent system. Our agent integrates the MAPE-K feedback loop with ARTIS agent for the provision of self-adaptation. For an unambiguous description, we formally specify our SA-ARTIS-agent using Time-Communicating Object-Z (TCOZ) language. The objective of this research is to provide an intelligent agent with self-adaptive abilities for the execution of tasks with temporal constraints. Previous works in this domain have used Z language which is not expressive to model the distributed communication process of agents. The novelty of our work is that we specified the non-terminating behavior of agents using active class concept of TCOZ and expressed the distributed communication among agents. For communication between active entities, channel communication mechanism of TCOZ is utilized. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed agent using a real-time case study of traffic monitoring system

Challenges and drivers for data mining in the AEC sector

Purpose: This paper explores the current challenges and drivers for data mining in the AEC sector. Design/methodology/approach: Following a comprehensive literature review, the data mining concept was investigated through a workshop with industry experts and academics. Findings: The results showed that the key drivers for using data mining within the AEC sector is associated with the sustainability, process improvement, market intelligence, cost certainty and cost reduction, performance certainty and decision support systems agendas in the sector. As for the processes with the greatest potential for data mining application, design, construction, procurement, forensic analysis, sustainability and energy consumption and reuse of digital components were perceived as the main process areas. While the key challenges were perceived as being, data issues due to the fragmented nature of the construction process, the need for a cultural change, IT systems used in silos, skills requirements and having clearly defined business goals. Originality/value: With the increasing abundance of data, business intelligence and analytics and its related concepts, data mining and big data have captured the attention of practitioners and academics for the last 20 years. On the other hand, and despite the growing amount of data in its business context, the AEC sector still lags behind in utilising those concepts in its end products and daily operations with limited research conducted to explore those issues at the sector level. This paper investigates the main opportunities and barriers for Data Mining in the AEC sector with a practical focus. Keywords: Business analytics, Data Mining, Data Analytics, AEC, Facilities Managemen

Efficient performative actions for e-commerce agents

The foundational features of multi-agent systems are communication and interaction with other agents. To achieve these features, agents have to transfer messages in the predefined format and semantics. The communication among these agents takes place with the help of ACL (Agent Communication Language). ACL is a predefined language for communication among agents that has been standardised by the FIPA (Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agent). FIPA-ACL defines different performatives for communication among the agents. These performatives are generic, and it becomes computationally expensive to use them for a specific domain like e-commerce. These performatives do not define the exact meaning of communication for any specific domain like e-commerce. In the present research, we introduced new performatives specifically for e-commerce domain. Our designed performatives are based on FIPA-ACL so that they can still support communication within diverse agent platforms. The proposed performatives are helpful in modelling e-commerce negotiation protocol applications using the paradigm of multi-agent systems for efficient communication. For exact semantic interpretation of the proposed performatives, we also performed formal modelling of these performatives using BNF. The primary objective of our research was to provide the negotiation facility to agents, working in an e-commerce domain, in a succinct way to reduce the number of negotiation messages, time consumption and network overhead on the platform. We used an e-commerce based bidding case study among agents to demonstrate the efficiency of our approach. The results showed that there was a lot of reduction in total time required for the bidding process

Technology strategies for globally dispersed construction teams

SUMMARY: Groups of geographically and/or organizationally dispersed members are increasingly being assembled to accomplish a wide range of organizational tasks using a combination of telecommunication and information technologies. The emergence of such technologically savvy globally dispersed teams has also heralded a complex and largely uninvestigated area of interaction practices of such team members. By enabling team interactions via non-traditional media, information technologies have actually expanded and transformed the conventional team interaction space. This paper assesses the impact of team interaction space on perceived team performance using qualitative and quantitative research techniques. To collect qualitative data, interviews were conducted with members from globally dispersed teams from three Global 500 companies. Audio, video and face-to-face team interactions between these team members were observed and analyzed. A survey on team interaction space was administered to the team members to substantiate the research hypotheses with quantitative data. Triangulating the qualitative and quantitative data, significant correlation was discovered between the effectiveness of the team interaction space and perceived team performance. Factor, path and qualitative analysis demonstrated that organization protocols, communication technologies and spatial setup positively affect interaction space effectiveness. The paper introduces team interaction space as a mediating variable to explain the role of technology, organizational processes and spatial setup on perceived team performance. To apply the research findings in industrial settings, the paper develops a team interaction space framework for designing and managing the environment for globally dispersed teams

QoS based optimal resource allocation and workload balancing for fog enabled IoT

This paper is aimed at efficiently distributing workload between the Fog Layer and the Cloud Network and then optimizing resource allocation in cloud networks to ensure better utilization and quick response time of the resources available to the end user. We have employed a Dead-line aware scheme to migrate the data between cloud and Fog networks based on data profiling and then used K-Means clustering and Service-request prediction model to allocate the resources efficiently to all requests. To substantiate our model, we have used iFogSim, which is an extension of the CloudSim simulator. The results clearly show that when an optimized network is used the Quality of Service parameters exhibit better efficiency and output