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Editorial for special issue – Civil engineering informatics
Advanced Engineering Informatics 23 (2009) 359–360
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Advanced Engineering Informatics journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/aei
Editorial
Editorial for special issue – Civil engineering informatics
John Miles is the Head of the Institute of Computational Engineering, Cardiff School of Engineering, Cardiff University and a member of the Editorial Board of ADVEI. Civil engineering is arguably the oldest of all engineering professions and one that poses unique challenges for practitioners. In many sectors of engineering, it is possible to build and test prototypes before production commences. For the civil engineer, almost all designs are for products which are not mass produced and therefore what is constructed is the prototype. Likewise, although almost all civil engineering products are constructed from basic and relatively common materials and components (steel, concrete, pipes, bricks, etc.), their complexity, especially in terms of number of components and their interdependence, significantly exceeds that of what are generally perceived as being more advanced products such as automobiles and airplanes. In addition to the above, a major characteristic of the civil engineering industry is that it is highly fragmented with most of the companies being very small. For example, in the UK, 93% of all civil engineering companies have 14 or fewer employees. Furthermore, these companies are expected to provide safe and functional solutions for projects that are built and then used in increasingly uncertain environments. The above factors result in a high degree of risk, with the value of the work commonly being much greater than the value of the company involved. If things go wrong, it can be a financial disaster, frequently resulting in bankruptcy. While the special challenges facing civil engineers mean that they could benefit from use of high-end computing applications, high levels of risk contribute to delaying acceptance of much innovation. Despite this, there is a healthy research community which is working in a wide range of application areas. The European Group for Intelligent Computing in Engineering (EG-ICE) holds annual workshops where the majority of the papers deal with applications relating to civil engineering. To ensure that these are not inward looking, and to provide international standard benchmarking, workshops always have participants from outside Europe and are, for example, sponsored by the American Society of Civil Engineers. Therefore there is always a strong presence of top quality papers from North America and elsewhere. The fifteenth workshop was held in Plymouth UK in July 2008. Over 40 papers were presented and after the workshop, the participants were invited to substantially enhance and revise their papers and submit them for this special issue. Just under 40% of the participants responded to this offer and the nine papers presented here are those that were revealed during the reviewing process to be the best. 1474-0346/$ - see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.aei.2009.07.001
The papers cover wide range of subjects and technologies. There is, for instance a paper by Strug and Slusarczyk which describes the use of hypergraphs which are mined to locate frequently occurring sub-graphs. These are used to create new design solutions. The authors’ work is part of a substantial and impressive research effort in this area from the Jagellonion University in Cracow. Borrmann and Rank from Technische Universität München present a paper on the Topological analysis of 3D Building Models using a Spatial Query Language. Current research relating to the 3D modelling of buildings has largely concentrated on product models and hence the technologies for coping with the spatial relationships in 3D have not received the attention they deserve. Therefore software tools which allow designers to undertake a complex spatial analysis of digital building models are not yet available. Their approach uses an octree-based algorithm with a breadth-first traversal and the application of rules that are based on the color of the octants under examination. The algorithm successively increases the discrete resolution of the spatial objects employed, thus enabling the user to handle topological relationships in a fuzzy manner. The conceptual design of buildings is a particularly challenging area particularly because of the large search spaces involved. Usually the method of estimating the size of the search space is undertaken by looking at the total number of possible combinations. This is not entirely satisfactory because not all of the combinations will be feasible and some will be very similar. Therefore the work of Struck et al. who gather empirical evidence on size, character and content of the search space for building design projects is particularly useful. The modelling and visualization of a building’s performance throughout its lifetime is the subject of the paper by Gursel et al. As they state, during the life cycle of a building, the processes which occur, and which are monitored, are numerous and in many cases highly complex, resulting in semantically rich, context dependent information. Their work develops a model supported by an ontology to represent this information in a way which improves performance assessment procedures. Flood et al. describe a Artificial Neural Network (ANN) based approach for modelling bomb blasts in built up areas. The modelling of blast waves is a highly complex process which is typically undertaken using Computational Fluid Dynamics. These simulations are so computationally demanding that they can take several days even on a super computer. Flood et al. develop three approaches to the problem, two of which are steady state and just predict peak pressures and one of which is dynamic. Their work
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Editorial / Advanced Engineering Informatics 23 (2009) 359–360
shows the challenges of training an ANN for such a complex problem and how these can be overcome. Civil engineering structures tend to be large and complex in their reaction to loads and the environment. Thus when damage occurs, determining its extent and cause is a challenge that is often met through installing sensors. What type of sensor, how many sensors and where should they be located are all non-trivial problems. Kripakaran and Smith show how using a rational and systematic approach based on a global optimization, followed by a greedy strategy, sensible choices for measurement locations can be made. Their work is supported using two real bridges and assumed damage scenarios. There are two papers from the University of Exeter. The first by Bello-Dambatta et al., looks at decision making processes for contaminated land using decision analysis methods which are based on decision theory. The second paper is by Javadi and Rezania who presented a new approach for constitutive modelling of materials in finite element analysis through integration with an evolutionary polynomial-regression-based constitutive model. This results in an optimum structure for the material constitutive model representation, as well as its parameters. The final paper is from a research team at Georgia Tech and is authored by Teizer and Vela. They examine the feasibility of workforce tracking on construction sites using video cameras. Both static and moving cameras are included in the work which also deals
with the challenges posed by the significant amount of visual clutter which occurs on construction sites, the changing photometric visual content throughout the course of a day, and the presence of occluding and moving obstacles. They examine the use of four tracking techniques, density mean-shift, Bayesian segmentation, active contours, and graph-cuts. While compiling this editorial, I tried hard to find a theme or set of themes amongst the papers so that they could be grouped logically. The fact that this has not been possible shows the breadth of the current research in civil engineering. The contributions also show challenges that are faced everyday by civil engineers. They need high-level early design support in order to process a myriad of options for input into appropriate analytical tools that predict how the intended artefact will perform. The papers in this special issue are examples of progress in this area. John Miles Institute of Computational Engineering, Cardiff School of Engineering, Cardiff University, The Parade, Cardiff CF24 3AA, United Kingdom Tel.: +44 2920875694. E-mail address: [email protected] Available online 3 August 2009
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Advanced Engineering Informatics journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/aei
Editorial
Editorial for special issue – Civil engineering informatics
John Miles is the Head of the Institute of Computational Engineering, Cardiff School of Engineering, Cardiff University and a member of the Editorial Board of ADVEI. Civil engineering is arguably the oldest of all engineering professions and one that poses unique challenges for practitioners. In many sectors of engineering, it is possible to build and test prototypes before production commences. For the civil engineer, almost all designs are for products which are not mass produced and therefore what is constructed is the prototype. Likewise, although almost all civil engineering products are constructed from basic and relatively common materials and components (steel, concrete, pipes, bricks, etc.), their complexity, especially in terms of number of components and their interdependence, significantly exceeds that of what are generally perceived as being more advanced products such as automobiles and airplanes. In addition to the above, a major characteristic of the civil engineering industry is that it is highly fragmented with most of the companies being very small. For example, in the UK, 93% of all civil engineering companies have 14 or fewer employees. Furthermore, these companies are expected to provide safe and functional solutions for projects that are built and then used in increasingly uncertain environments. The above factors result in a high degree of risk, with the value of the work commonly being much greater than the value of the company involved. If things go wrong, it can be a financial disaster, frequently resulting in bankruptcy. While the special challenges facing civil engineers mean that they could benefit from use of high-end computing applications, high levels of risk contribute to delaying acceptance of much innovation. Despite this, there is a healthy research community which is working in a wide range of application areas. The European Group for Intelligent Computing in Engineering (EG-ICE) holds annual workshops where the majority of the papers deal with applications relating to civil engineering. To ensure that these are not inward looking, and to provide international standard benchmarking, workshops always have participants from outside Europe and are, for example, sponsored by the American Society of Civil Engineers. Therefore there is always a strong presence of top quality papers from North America and elsewhere. The fifteenth workshop was held in Plymouth UK in July 2008. Over 40 papers were presented and after the workshop, the participants were invited to substantially enhance and revise their papers and submit them for this special issue. Just under 40% of the participants responded to this offer and the nine papers presented here are those that were revealed during the reviewing process to be the best. 1474-0346/$ - see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.aei.2009.07.001
The papers cover wide range of subjects and technologies. There is, for instance a paper by Strug and Slusarczyk which describes the use of hypergraphs which are mined to locate frequently occurring sub-graphs. These are used to create new design solutions. The authors’ work is part of a substantial and impressive research effort in this area from the Jagellonion University in Cracow. Borrmann and Rank from Technische Universität München present a paper on the Topological analysis of 3D Building Models using a Spatial Query Language. Current research relating to the 3D modelling of buildings has largely concentrated on product models and hence the technologies for coping with the spatial relationships in 3D have not received the attention they deserve. Therefore software tools which allow designers to undertake a complex spatial analysis of digital building models are not yet available. Their approach uses an octree-based algorithm with a breadth-first traversal and the application of rules that are based on the color of the octants under examination. The algorithm successively increases the discrete resolution of the spatial objects employed, thus enabling the user to handle topological relationships in a fuzzy manner. The conceptual design of buildings is a particularly challenging area particularly because of the large search spaces involved. Usually the method of estimating the size of the search space is undertaken by looking at the total number of possible combinations. This is not entirely satisfactory because not all of the combinations will be feasible and some will be very similar. Therefore the work of Struck et al. who gather empirical evidence on size, character and content of the search space for building design projects is particularly useful. The modelling and visualization of a building’s performance throughout its lifetime is the subject of the paper by Gursel et al. As they state, during the life cycle of a building, the processes which occur, and which are monitored, are numerous and in many cases highly complex, resulting in semantically rich, context dependent information. Their work develops a model supported by an ontology to represent this information in a way which improves performance assessment procedures. Flood et al. describe a Artificial Neural Network (ANN) based approach for modelling bomb blasts in built up areas. The modelling of blast waves is a highly complex process which is typically undertaken using Computational Fluid Dynamics. These simulations are so computationally demanding that they can take several days even on a super computer. Flood et al. develop three approaches to the problem, two of which are steady state and just predict peak pressures and one of which is dynamic. Their work
360
Editorial / Advanced Engineering Informatics 23 (2009) 359–360
shows the challenges of training an ANN for such a complex problem and how these can be overcome. Civil engineering structures tend to be large and complex in their reaction to loads and the environment. Thus when damage occurs, determining its extent and cause is a challenge that is often met through installing sensors. What type of sensor, how many sensors and where should they be located are all non-trivial problems. Kripakaran and Smith show how using a rational and systematic approach based on a global optimization, followed by a greedy strategy, sensible choices for measurement locations can be made. Their work is supported using two real bridges and assumed damage scenarios. There are two papers from the University of Exeter. The first by Bello-Dambatta et al., looks at decision making processes for contaminated land using decision analysis methods which are based on decision theory. The second paper is by Javadi and Rezania who presented a new approach for constitutive modelling of materials in finite element analysis through integration with an evolutionary polynomial-regression-based constitutive model. This results in an optimum structure for the material constitutive model representation, as well as its parameters. The final paper is from a research team at Georgia Tech and is authored by Teizer and Vela. They examine the feasibility of workforce tracking on construction sites using video cameras. Both static and moving cameras are included in the work which also deals
with the challenges posed by the significant amount of visual clutter which occurs on construction sites, the changing photometric visual content throughout the course of a day, and the presence of occluding and moving obstacles. They examine the use of four tracking techniques, density mean-shift, Bayesian segmentation, active contours, and graph-cuts. While compiling this editorial, I tried hard to find a theme or set of themes amongst the papers so that they could be grouped logically. The fact that this has not been possible shows the breadth of the current research in civil engineering. The contributions also show challenges that are faced everyday by civil engineers. They need high-level early design support in order to process a myriad of options for input into appropriate analytical tools that predict how the intended artefact will perform. The papers in this special issue are examples of progress in this area. John Miles Institute of Computational Engineering, Cardiff School of Engineering, Cardiff University, The Parade, Cardiff CF24 3AA, United Kingdom Tel.: +44 2920875694. E-mail address: [email protected] Available online 3 August 2009