Adaptive minimized communication protocol based on BIM

PurposeThe advent of web services and the semantic web have opened up opportunities for a new generation of interoperable systems on the web. The purpose of this paper is to show the importance of semantics in design and construction, and how this has long been recognised and addressed to varying extents by researchers.Design/methodology/approachThere is now the potential for designs to be developed through a system of collaborating design services and for input by the construction team members. The potential also extends to the construction phase where the designers can provide more timely responses to problems encountered in the field. Within this environment, there is the need for effective mechanisms for design and construction information management, in addition to an ontology that facilitates the sharing of design and construction information and the underlying semantics. This paper explores these trends in collaborative design and construction, and presents an ontology‐based approach to project information management in a semantic web environment.FindingsThe findings include a framework for semantic web‐based information management (SWIMS), which provides for effective collaborative information management. Examples, based on design and construction information, are presented to illustrate the key concepts.Originality/valueThis paper presents an innovative approach to overcoming the limitations of conventional information management approaches in construction. The proposed approach is expected to enhance collaboration, and avoid information loss, overload and misunderstanding,

In this paper, the authors explore the characteristics and requirementsof digitally supported ‘green’ building design. Well planned, integrated and interdisciplinary digital design practices play a vital role in the iterative processes of sustainable building design. Unlike traditional ways of working, the management of design information and process integration in green building design involves a wider range and a larger number of consultants utilizing sophisticated environmental modelling and analysis systems. To understand the complexities surrounding information management in this context, the authors focus on issues relating to: 1) information exchange and model management, and 2) multidisciplinary design process coordination. Different aspects of sustainable design modelling methodologies are explored in relation to technology requirements, information exchange, and multi-disciplinary collaboration. Finally, the literature is synthesised in a conceptual roadmap framing the key factors identified by the study.KeywordsBuilding information modelingenvironmental sustainable designinformation managementcollaboration

A design support system has been developed for the spiral development of object-oriented switching systems. This system quickly recovers software design information from the source code and supplies it to the developers. It provides uniform management of design and code information, revision control of design information, and representation corresponding to the switching software structure. This system reduces the cycle time in spiral development and improves switching software productivity.

The retrieval-only Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) systems do not provide acceptable accuracy in critical domains such as medical. Besides, the case adaptation process in CBR is often a challenging issue as it has been traditionally carried out manually by domain experts. In this paper, a new case-based approach using transformational adaptation rules called "range adaptation rules" is proposed to improve the accuracy of a retrieval-only CBR system. The rangeadaptation rules are automatically generated from the case-base. In this approach, after solving each new problem, the case-base is expanded and the range adaptation rules are updated automatically. To evaluate the proposed approach, a prototype is implemented and experimented in agriculture domain to classify the IRIS plant types. The experimental results show that the proposed approach increases the classification accuracy comparing with the retrieval-only CBR system.KeywordsCase-based reasoning (CBR)Case adaptationIRIS plant classificationRange adaptation rules

In this paper, we propose a hybrid case-based reasoning (CBR) system for predicting the construction cost of high-rise buildings at the preliminary design stage. First, the extracted cost factors (CFs) of a high-rise building were shown to significantly improve the cost estimation system’s performance. For developing a CBR system, a hybrid approach that combines CBR with genetic algorithms (GAs) for cost estimation was adopted. Genetic algorithms were used for optimized weight generation and applied to real project cases. Additionally, this paper proposes the identification of an alternative similarity score measurement formula. The proposed formula evaluates the contrast between the alternative case matching approach and the classical formula in a scenario involving the use of cost factors describing a case. The results indicate that the proposed GA-based CBR system can consistently reduce errors and potentially be useful to owners and contractors in the early financial planning stage. Accordingly, it is expected that the developed CBR system would provide decision-makers with accurate cost information to assess and compare multiple alternatives for obtaining the optimal solution and controlling the cost.

The motivation behind the CDP interdisciplinary research project is to resolve the current discrepancy between familiar, analogue ways of working in the early architectural design stages and the ever increasing use of digital tools in office practice. The project’s objective is the conception and prototypical realisation of an interactive work environment for use in the early design phases. By directly linking familiar analogue ways of working with digital computer aided design tools, the CDP represents a working environment that allows designers to work the way they are used to while making use of the potential of computers. This paper describes the first results of a design environment for supporting the conceptual phase of urban design.

A business strategy based on customized products with a high level of variety requires systems for efficient generation of product variants. An area identified in near collaboration with five industrial partners that has not been subject for extensive research is how to support management of different application domains, projects, task knowledge and design information together with the possibility to perform detailed analyses on the data generated by a design automation system implementation. Initially, a number of success criteria were identified and the functionality of a database was perceived as a promising approach. Explorative work was conducted for the purpose to reveal the conceptual model and the principles that a system would reside upon. The work has resulted in an approach, consisting of an information model and underlying principles, presented in this paper to be used when developing a design automation system for quotation preparation. The functionality and usefulness has been demonstrated and validated by a system implementation developed in collaboration with an industry partner. It can be concluded that a system founded on the presented approach supports management and analysis of quotations and product variants.

Research aircraft have become increasingly dependent on advanced control systems to accomplish program goals. These aircraft are integrating multiple disciplines to improve performance and satisfy research objectives. This integration is being accomplished through electronic control systems. Because of the number of systems involved and the variety of engineering disciplines, systems design methods and information management have become essential to program success. The primary objective of the system design/information tool for aircraft flight control system is to help transfer flight control system design knowledge to the flight test community. By providing all of the design information and covering multiple disciplines in a structured, graphical manner, flight control systems can more easily be understood by the test engineers. This will provide the engineers with the information needed to thoroughly ground test the system and thereby reduce the likelihood of serious design errors surfacing in flight. The secondary objective is to apply structured design techniques to all of the design domains. By using the techniques in the top level system design down through the detailed hardware and software designs, it is hoped that fewer design anomalies will result. The flight test experiences of three highly complex, integrated aircraft programs are reviewed: the X-29 forward-swept wing, the advanced fighter technology integration (AFTI) F-16, and the highly maneuverable aircraft technology (HiMAT) program. Significant operating anomalies and the design errors which cause them, are examined to help identify what functions a system design/information tool should provide to assist designers in avoiding errors.

During the early phases of engineering design, the costs committed are high, costs incurred are low, and the design freedom is high. It is well documented that decisions made in these early design phases drive the entire design's life cycle cost. In a traditional paradigm, key design decisions are made when little is known about the design. As the design matures, design changes become more difficult in both cost and schedule to enact. The current capability-based paradigm, which has emerged because of the constrained economic environment, calls for the infusion of knowledge usually acquired during later design phases into earlier design phases, i.e. bringing knowledge acquired during preliminary and detailed design into pre-conceptual and conceptual design. An area of critical importance to launch vehicle design is the optimization of its ascent trajectory, as the optimal trajectory will be able to take full advantage of the launch vehicle's capability to deliver a maximum amount of payload into orbit. Hence, the optimal ascent trajectory plays an important role in the vehicle's affordability posture yet little of the information required to successfully optimize a trajectory is known early in the design phase. Thus, the current paradigm of optimizing ascent trajectories involves generating point solutions for every change in a vehicle's design parameters. This is often a very tedious, manual, and time-consuming task for the analysts. Moreover, the trajectory design space is highly non-linear and multi-modal due to the interaction of various constraints. When these obstacles are coupled with the Program to Optimize Simulated Trajectories (POST), an industry standard program to optimize ascent trajectories that is difficult to use, expert trajectory analysts are required to effectively optimize a vehicle's ascent trajectory. Over the course of this paper, the authors discuss a methodology developed at NASA Marshall's Advanced Concepts Office to address these issues. The methodology is two-fold: first, capture the heuristics developed by human analysts over their many years of experience; and secondly, leverage the power of modern computing to evaluate multiple trajectories simultaneously and therefore enable the exploration of the trajectory's design space early during the pre- conceptual and conceptual phases of design. This methodology is coupled with design of experiments in order to train surrogate models, which enables trajectory design space visualization and parametric optimal ascent trajectory information to be available when early design decisions are being made.

In recent years, much time and attention have been focused on developing ways to employ physics-based analysis methods in aircraft design. These efforts are extremely valuable. They offer increased detail and flexibility for unusual aircraft configurations and difficult flight regimes. However, at least at present, there is still an important place for semi-empirical analysis models in early conceptual aircraft design. This paper describes some of the most effective of these models and demonstrates their accuracy in predicting characteristics of actual aircraft. It also describes some of the significant advantages of simple analytical models in early conceptual design. In particular, this paper shows how simple methods implemented on computer spreadsheets have an advantage over other methods and codes because they can more rapidly complete successive design cycles. This allows very rapid manual optimization of a design concept on the spreadsheet. This paper describes one example where students using a spreadsheet-based aircraft modeling and analysis system developed a design concept that was more completely optimized for its design mission than five competing designs developed by experienced professional engineers in both government and industry design shops. The speed and agility of semi-empirical models on spreadsheets allowed these students to complete many more optimization cycles than their professional counterparts. After the student design was chosen for further development by professionals, its configuration changed very little, indicating it was already well optimized as a concept. The paper describes similar successes with extremely simplified analyses and shows how some good semi-empirical methods can be useful even in preliminary and detail design of certain types of aircraft.

As organizsations adopt the principles of total quality and become customer oriented new measures are needed to assess product performance within a variety of organizational settings. This study reports the relationships between usage of quality information, employee participation and quality management in product design and product performance. Using data collection with quality managers of a sample of industrial companies, rigorous factor analysis and regression analysis and regression analysis have been fostered and hypotheses regarding variables used for describing product performance of organizational settings have been described.

A framework of information and knowledge management for product design and development — A text mining approach

This paper identifies key requirements for an advanced engineering design information management system. With the advent of information management technology and design automation, the definition of Computer Aided Design (CAD) systems has evolved beyond the realm of geometric data to include support for a very wide range of activities of an intelligent design agent — such as definition, manipulation and analyses of complex information models of a product. These information models represent not only conventional product data associated with typical CAD applications (FEM, NC, Geometric models, etc.), but also design information characterizing correlations between the requirements, function, behavior and form dimensions of the design. The new generation of CAD systems are expected to provide the designer with capabilities for defining, manipulating and reasoning with such models. These new functionalities are important to individual designers, as well as organizations as the need to manage information as a corporate asset is becoming a a critical facet of corporate strategies. This paper explores these needs using design scenarios that trace the conceptual phases of design as well as the organization relevance to the design process. The first scenario deals with the innovative design of drilling applications for lunar environments, while the second scenario deals with the routine design of computer peripherals in a collaborative, multidisciplinary environment. These scenarios are used to elicit high level requirements, and subsequently the development of prototype systems. Preliminary results from the prototypes are presented herein.

Contributors

In a product development process, it is crucial to understand and evaluate multiple and synergic aspects of systems such as performance, cost, reliability, and safety. These aspects are mainly considered during later stages of the design process. However, in order to improve the foundations for decision-making, this article presents methods that are intended to increase the engineering knowledge in the early design phases. In complex products, different systems from a multitude of engineering disciplines have to work tightly together. Collaborative design is described as a process where a product is designed through the collective and joint efforts of domain experts. A collaborative multidisciplinary design optimization process is therefore proposed in the conceptual design phase in order to increase the likelihood of more accurate decisions being taken early on. The performance of the presented framework is demonstrated in an industrial application to design aircraft systems in the conceptual phase.