thesis

Semantic Grid Technologies in Computer Integrated Construction

Abstract

Important goal of computer science in civil engineering projects is to facilitate dynamic collaboration among the companies, improvements of services and reuse of programs, data, information and knowledge. Civil engineering has some specific requirements concerning computer applications, which arise from the irrepeatability and scale of particular civil engineering products, processes and collaborating groups. Internet technologies are basis for linking processes in all construction phases, which leads to computer integrated construction. Computing grid, or shortly grid is a service infrastructure, which is being developed to facilitate infinite and seamless sharing of widely distributed, heterogeneous resources, hence, contributing towards the solution of complex engineering problems. A hypothesis of this work is that the grid can become viable platform for computer integrated construction, if semantic technologies are used for its development, i.e. ontologies and metadata, information, ontology and resource broker grid services. The hypothesis is tested by developing an ontology that defines the concept of a grid resource to describe specific resources in a grid environment. The aforementioned grid services are included in the design of a grid system, and are developed and deployed in a test bed. The test bed allows for the execution of complex grid applications, which take the form of workflows. It is shown that the ontology and the metadata about grid resources are useful when enabling, discovering, selecting and dynamically integrating resources on the grid. This approach yields several improvements against existing systems: a higher level of abstraction when developing and executing innovative and powerful engineering applications, greater flexibility, resource utilization and security, which is very important for dynamic collaboration within virtual organizations

    Similar works