A constraint manager to support virtual maintainability

Virtual prototyping tools have already captivated the industry's interest as viable design tool. One of the key challenges for the research community is to extend the capabilities of Virtual Reality technology beyond its current scope of ergonomics and design reviews. The research presented in this paper is part of a larger research programme that aims to perform maintainability assessment on virtual prototypes. This paper discusses the design and implementation of a geometric constraint manager that has been designed to support physical realism and interactive assembly and disassembly tasks within virtual environments. The key techniques employed by the constraint manager are direct interaction, automatic constraint recognition, constraint satisfaction and constrained motion. Various optimization techniques have been implemented to achieve real-time interaction with large industrial models

Community resilience frameworks for building disaster resilient community in Malaysia

Disasters cannot be prevented fully but their impacts and severity can be lessened through the application of certain frameworks. However, there is currently a lack of a robust framework in building the disaster resilient and sustainable communities in Malaysia. Malaysians are increasingly finding themselves not being spared from disasters especially flood events. In order to keep pace with these occurring disasters in Malaysia, Community Resilience Frameworks are the backbone strategies among various stakeholders and can assure non-futile efforts for building safer and more resilient communities. Community Resilience Framework sets out the drivers, existing good practices, scopes, aims and work streams respectively for a long-term programme designed to increase the disaster resilience of communities. This paper has attempted to review the existence of disaster resilient communities in detail. Some Community Resilience Frameworks in the context of natural disasters in Malaysia will also be discussed. In this paper, literature is used as a foundation for a new insight contribution. A document analysis method on relevant policies and literatures also been adopted. It is envisaged that the findings of this study could be clinically useful for building a disaster resilient community and also closing the gaps in disaster risk reduction (DRR) in Malaysi

Critical Failure Factors of Flood Early Warning and Response Systems (FEWRS): A Structured Literature Review and Interpretive Structural Modelling (ISM) Analysis

Flood warning and response systems are essential components of risk reduction strategies with the potential to reduce loss of life and impact on personal assets. However, recent flood incidents have caused significant loss of human lives due to failures in current flood warning and response mechanisms. These failures are broadly related to policies concerning, and governance aspects within, warning generation, the behaviour of communities in responding to early warnings, and weaknesses in associated tools and technologies used in communicating early warnings and responding. Capturing critical failure factors affecting flood warning and response systems can provide opportunities for making corrective measures and for developing a more advanced and futuristic system for early flood warnings. This paper reports the findings of a structured review that was conducted to identify critical failure factors in flood early warning and response systems. This study found twenty-four critical failure factors (CFFs). The interpretive structural modelling (ISM) approach conducted in this study resulted in identifying four different types of failure factors (autonomous, dependent, linkage, and independent) with varying dependence and driving powers. Analysis shows that governance, leadership, finance, standard operating procedures (SoP), and community engagement are the most dominating factors with the highest driving factor, which can overcome other dependent factors. The outcome of this review could be helpful for policymakers and practitioners in overcoming failure factors and implementing effective early warning and response systems

Modelling Interrelationships of the Factors Impeding Community Engagement in Risk-Sensitive Urban Planning: Evidence from Sri Lanka

During the last two decades, global disasters have impacted over 5.2 billion people, with economic losses exceeding USD 2.97 trillion. This underscores the critical need for inclusive risk-sensitive urban planning (RSUP) that integrates community insights. Community-based disaster risk reduction (CBDRR) has demonstrated a potential reduction of up to 40% in mortality rates during disasters and cost savings in disaster response and recovery. However, research has shown that only 20% felt they are involved in decisions related to neighborhood planning, despite communities’ lived experience in surviving local hazards. This highlights a gap where practitioners dominate the development of mitigation and development plans, sidelining local perspectives. Using Sri Lanka as a case study, this study investigated the barriers to effective community participation in the decision-making of RSUP and thereby developed an interpretive logic model to establish an understanding of why they occur and how each barrier is interlinked. The data gathered from a sample of 44 experts and community representatives revealed 19 factors that impede community inclusion in the decision-making of RSUP in Sri Lanka. The Total Interpretive Structural Modelling (TISM) analysis adopted identified that the absence of legal provisions for inclusive development, political dynamics, and corruption are the most significant barriers. The Matrix Impact of Cross Multiplication Applied to Classification (MICMAC) further revealed that fewer financial provisions and the absence of an institutional framework for community engagement are the linking barriers to the other 17 barriers. This study not only extends the theoretical debate on barriers to community engagement for risk-responsive and equitable development but also helps urban planners, disaster management practitioners, and strategy policymakers focus on critical areas that need major reforms

A conceptual framework for multi-modal interactive virtual workspaces

Construction projects involve a large number of both direct stakeholders (clients, professional teams, contractors, etc.) and indirect stakeholders (local authorities, residents, workers, etc.). Current methods of communicating building design information can lead to several types of difficulties (e.g. incomplete understanding of the planned construction, functional inefficiencies, inaccurate initial work or clashes between components, etc.). Integrated software solutions based on VR technologies can bring significant value improvement and cost reduction to the Construction Industry. The aim of this paper is to present research being carried out in the frame of the DIVERCITY project (Distributed Virtual Workspace for Enhancing Communication within the Construction Industry - IST project n°13365), funded under the European IST programme (Information Society Technologies). DIVERCITY's goal is to develop a Virtual Workspace that addresses three key building construction phases: (1) Client briefing (with detailed interaction between clients and architects); (2) Design Review (which requires detailed input from multidisciplinary teams - architects, engineers, facility managers, etc.); (3) Construction (aiming to fabricate or refurbish the building).Using a distributed architecture, the DIVERCITY system aims to support and enhance concurrent engineering practices for these three phases allowing teams based in different geographic locations to collaboratively design, test and validate shared virtual projects. The global DIVERCITY project will be presented in terms of objectives and the software architecture will be detailed.149-162Pubblicat

Inter-Organisational Collaboration Structures and Features to Facilitate Stakeholder Collaboration

Although inter-organisational collaborative structures play a vital role in determining the level of collaboration among organisations, the identification of required organisational structural types and their features to facilitate fruitful collaboration is not satisfactorily discussed in existing studies. In addition, the connection between inter-organisational structural types and features, and their influence on collaboration, is not well understood. This systematised literature review study explores the available inter-organisational collaborative structural types, features, and their suitability to facilitate collaboration among organisations. Our findings underscore the importance of adopting a hybrid form of hierarchy and network arrangements to facilitate effective collaboration among organisations. Furthermore, this study developed a framework that presents how collaboration depends on inter-organisational structures and their features in facilitating vertical and horizontal integration. This framework can be used to identify the inter-organisational collaboration structures that are required to move towards a desired inter-organisational collaboration level

A walk-through system for building acoustics evaluation based on virtual environment technology

Virtual Reality technology, especially visualization and auralization, provides a useful method to interactively implement the subjective analysis and evaluation of acoustic properties prior to the actual construction of a building. This paper presents a Virtual Environment-based walk-through system for interactive acoustic evaluation of buildings within a CAVE environment. It describes the architecture of the system, the system components, schedule algorithm, synchronous integration of acoustic simulation and visualization. The trade-off algorithm of the real time simplified acoustic space simulation by B-format soundfield representation, non real time detailed acoustic space simulation and the comparison between them are also mentioned. Some cases such as airport, cinema, boardroom, underground station and classroom are studied in the two simulation methods respectively. The potential applications of this system are presented as well

Measuring environmental resilience using Q-methods: a Malaysian perspective

© 2022 The Authors. Published by MDPI. This is an open access article available under a Creative Commons licence. The published version can be accessed at the following link on the publisher’s website: https://doi.org/10.3390/su142214749Communities increasingly need tools that can help them assess the environmental risks they face to understand better their capacities in mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. Environmental resilience (ER) is a crucial feature of community resilience that is not adequately covered in the literature. This paper proposes an inclusive, participatory approach to achieve stakeholder engagement on the definitions, objectives, and indicators for measuring ER at the community level. This study uses a 5-step approach utilising Q-methods to contextualise a resilience index for Environmental Resilience (ER). An initial set of 57 indicators from 13 frameworks from the literature was reduced to 25 by combining the indicators of similar type, format and terminology. A total of 10 participants from two groups (academics and practitioners) took part in the interviews and Q-sort workshops in Malaysia in this study. Both stakeholder groups identified Ecosystem monitoring as one of the most critical indicators to understand ER, closely followed by rapid damage assessments and an effective communication system. The exercise also revealed marked differences between them regarding the importance of fair access to basic needs and services for citizens, a priority for academics, and the value of building green infrastructure, a priority for practitioners, with the most significant difference between the two groups on the importance of measuring the natural defences of a community. The Environmental Resilience Capacity Assessment Tool (ER-CAT), proposed in this paper, can be used by local governments and communities for engagement, discussion and consensus building to select the resilience indicators that are most relevant to them in their contexts.The authors express their gratitude to the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) for the financial support under the International Grant, EP/PO28543/1, entitled “A Collaborative Multi-Agency Platform for Building Resilient Communities” for the work reported in this paper. This work was also supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) under the Grant ES/T003219/1 entitled “Technology Enhanced Stakeholder Collaboration for Supporting Risk-Sensitive Sustainable Urban Development”.Published onlin

Measuring Environmental Resilience Using Q-Methods: A Malaysian Perspective

first_pagesettingsOrder Article ReprintsOpen AccessArticleMeasuring Environmental Resilience Using Q-Methods: A Malaysian Perspectiveby Hisham Tariq 1,*ORCID,Chaminda Pathirage 2ORCID,Terrence Fernando 1ORCID,Noralfishah Sulaiman 3,Umber Nazir 3,Siti Kursiah Kamalia Abdul Latib 3 andHaidaliza Masram 31School of Science, Engineering & Environment, University of Salford, Salford M5 4WT, UK2School of Architecture and Built Environment, University of Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton WV1 1LY, UK3KANZU Research, Resilient Built Environment (RBE), Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia, Johor 86400, Malaysia*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.Sustainability 2022, 14(22), 14749; https://doi.org/10.3390/su142214749Received: 9 October 2022 / Revised: 31 October 2022 / Accepted: 1 November 2022 / Published: 9 November 2022(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Building for Urban Development: Common Practices, Ethical Issues, Technologies, and Global Perspectives)Download Browse Figures Review Reports Versions NotesAbstractCommunities increasingly need tools that can help them assess the environmental risks they face to understand better their capacities in mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. Environmental resilience (ER) is a crucial feature of community resilience that is not adequately covered in the literature. This paper proposes an inclusive, participatory approach to achieve stakeholder engagement on the definitions, objectives, and indicators for measuring ER at the community level. This study uses a 5-step approach utilising Q-methods to contextualise a resilience index for Environmental Resilience (ER). An initial set of 57 indicators from 13 frameworks from the literature was reduced to 25 by combining the indicators of similar type, format and terminology. A total of 10 participants from two groups (academics and practitioners) took part in the interviews and Q-sort workshops in Malaysia in this study. Both stakeholder groups identified Ecosystem monitoring as one of the most critical indicators to understand ER, closely followed by rapid damage assessments and an effective communication system. The exercise also revealed marked differences between them regarding the importance of fair access to basic needs and services for citizens, a priority for academics, and the value of building green infrastructure, a priority for practitioners, with the most significant difference between the two groups on the importance of measuring the natural defences of a community. The Environmental Resilience Capacity Assessment Tool (ER-CAT), proposed in this paper, can be used by local governments and communities for engagement, discussion and consensus building to select the resilience indicators that are most relevant to them in their contexts

The relationship between maximal left ventricular wall thickness and sudden cardiac death in childhood onset hypertrophic cardiomyopathy

Background: Maximal left ventricular wall thickness (MLVWT) is a risk factor for sudden cardiac death (SCD) in hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM). In adults, the severity of left ventricular hypertrophy has a nonlinear relationship with SCD, but it is not known whether the same complex relationship is seen in childhood. The aim of this study was to describe the relationship between left ventricular hypertrophy and SCD risk in a large international pediatric HCM cohort. Methods: The study cohort comprised 1075 children (mean age, 10.2 years [±4.4]) diagnosed with HCM (1–16 years) from the International Paediatric Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy Consortium. Anonymized, noninvasive clinical data were collected from baseline evaluation and follow-up, and 5-year estimated SCD risk was calculated (HCM Risk-Kids). Results: MLVWT Z score was <10 in 598 (58.1%), ≥10 to <20 in 334 (31.1%), and ≥20 in 143 (13.3%). Higher MLVWT Z scores were associated with heart failure symptoms, unexplained syncope, left ventricular outflow tract obstruction, left atrial dilatation, and nonsustained ventricular tachycardia. One hundred twenty-two patients (71.3%) with MLVWT Z score ≥20 had coexisting risk factors for SCD. Over a median follow-up of 4.9 years (interquartile range, 2.3–9.3), 115 (10.7%) had an SCD event. Freedom from SCD event at 5 years for those with MLVWT Z scores <10, ≥10 to <20, and ≥20 was 95.6%, 87.4%, and 86.0, respectively. The estimated SCD risk at 5 years had a nonlinear, inverted U-shaped relationship with MLVWT Z score, peaking at Z score +23. The presence of coexisting risk factors had a summative effect on risk. Conclusions: In children with HCM, an inverted U-shaped relationship exists between left ventricular hypertrophy and estimated SCD risk. The presence of additional risk factors has a summative effect on risk. While MLVWT is important for risk stratification, it should not be used either as a binary variable or in isolation to guide implantable cardioverter defibrillator implantation decisions in children with HCM