Investigating the adaptability and implementation of computational design methods in concept design taking plasterboard opportunities for dimensional coordination and waste reduction as a case study

Construction material offcuts is a data problem that can largely be avoided by dimensional coordination during concept design.Besides the environmental benefits,early phase coordination is beneficial to the overall design process as it integrates information not typically considered until later in the design process.However,taking reality-changing actions is often challenged by uncertainty,time constraints,and lack of integration of available tools.Acknowledging the potential of computational design in enabling architects to manage design and coordination complexities and taking plasterboard opportunities for dimensional coordination,the paper presents a review and assessment of the existing methods to interrogate what,when,and how are these adaptable to the task.The study shows that ML-based methods outperform other methods and concludes that leveraging computational design powers to reduce offcuts is not a question of a tool,but one of a strategy.Eventually,the future steps to achieving such a strategy are discussed.

Toward Seamless Indoor-Outdoor Applications:Developing Stakeholder-Oriented Location-Based Services

Location-Based Services (LBS),an emerging new business based on smartphone and mobile networks,are becoming more and more popular.Most of these LBSs,however,only offer non-seamless indoor/outdoor applications and simple applications without giving stakeholders the chance to play an active role.Our specific aim is to solve these issues.This paper presents concepts to solve these issues by expanding the Open Location Services Interface Standard (OpenLS) to allow seamless indoor/outdoor positioning and to extend the content of the services to include information recommended by stakeholders.

NIBU:An Integrated Framework for Representing the Relation Among Building Structure and Interior Utilities in Micro-Scale Environment

This paper describes a framework for modeling interdependencies between different network systems and building structures.It provides an approach for the integrated analysis of interior building utilities by describing a framework to model and simulate infrastructure interdependencies and their complex behaviors.It is a graph-based spatial model that can support use cases such as providing the location and specifications of interior utilities to a technician who wants to perform a maintenance operation.This location could be needed for maintenance or replacement,or to investigate the result of damage to the building structure on another utility network,or to estimate the effect of different maintenance operations in different locations along utilities service systems.The model accounts for two important aspects:first,the relationship between interior utilities and building elements or spaces and second,the building hierarchy structure to which the utilities network is related.A proper hierarchy of the building is developed which supports the generation of human-oriented descriptions of interior utilities,where a method for partitions of large building element and spaces as well as a method to reference a network element to another building are developed.The connection of the different utilities network systems and buildings are generated using joints,which are based on a containment relation.An example is presented which shows the effectiveness of this approach for supporting maintenance operations,as well as the independences between the maintenance operation location and the other network systems.The paper presents the data model and explains the links with current 3D building model standards.

NIBU: a new approach to representing and analysing interior utility networks within 3D geo-information systems

Facility management departments’responsibilities include monitoring and maintenance of building infrastructure,such as water,gas or electricity.Very often these tasks are completed using paper maps,which make integrated analysis of networks challenging.Ability to consider interior network structure and provide semantic and connectivity information supporting the required analysis operations are thus crucial.This paper presents an approach relying on Building Information Model(BIM)as a data source for obtaining information about interior utilities.The semantic and connectivity information of BIM is mapped onto a new model called Network for Interior Building Utilities(NIBU).NIBU is based on the semantic categorisation of utilities,and the spatial functions that have to be performed.Three scenarios(‘maintenance operation’,‘emergency response’and‘inspection operation’)are developed to test the proposed approach.The model and its functions are implemented in spatial DBMS.The model is populated directly from a BIM server applying an Industrial Foundation Class(IFC)parser developed in-house.Five analysis functions are implemented to support spatial operations:trace upstream,trace downstream,find ancestors,find source and find disconnected.The investigation proves that BIM provides both the required semantics and attributes,and connectivity information that can facilitate analysis of interior utility networks.NIBU provides a simple yet flexible way to manage interior network information,which can be integrated into Digital Earth.

A unified 3D space-based navigation model for seamless navigation in indoor and outdoor

Seamless navigation has attracted lots of attention and many methods have been reported in the literature or made available as commercial applications.The process of navigation can be interpreted as a continuous movement of 3D objects from one unoccupied 3D indoor/outdoor space to another.From a technical perspective,a 3D navigation model is one of the critical components that should be available to perform successful navigation.A major approach to build a unified navigation model to support seamless path computation is linking indoor navigation networks to outdoor road/street-based networks.Because of different sources of indoor and outdoor navigation networks,the major approach fails to build up true seamless navigation models.With regards to this,we propose a unified 3D space-based navigation model(U3DSNM).The presented model ensures all types of spaces for navigation(indoor,semi-indoor,semi-outdoor,and outdoor)have the same representation,management methods,and network derivation approach,thereby building up unified navigation networks to support seamless navigation paths planning.The model can be linked to the international standards(data models)that are also based on spaces,such as IndoorGML and the on-going version of CityGML 3.0.Three navigation path planning cases show the feasibility of U3DSNM.