The interoperability challenge is a long-standing challenge in the domain of architecture, engineering and construction (AEC). Diverse approaches have already been presented for addressing this ...challenge. This article will look into the possibility of addressing the interoperability challenge in the building life-cycle with a linked data approach. An outline is given of how linked data technologies tend to be deployed, thereby working towards a “more holistic” perspective on the building, or towards a large-scale web of “linked building data”. From this overview, and the associated use case scenarios, we conclude that the interoperability challenge cannot be “solved” using linked data technologies, but that it can be addressed. In other words, information exchange and management can be improved, but a pragmatic usage of technologies is still required in practice. Finally, we give an initial outline of some anticipated use cases in the building life-cycle in which the usage of linked data technologies may generate advantages over existing technologies and methods.
Although the number and importance of joint innovation projects between suppliers and their customers continue to rise, the literature has yet to resolve a key question: Do embedded ties with ...customers help or hurt supplier innovation? Drawing on both the tie strength and knowledge literatures, the authors theorize that embedded ties interact with supplier and customer innovation knowledge to influence supplier innovation. In a sample of 157 Dutch business-to-business innovation relationships, they observe that embedded ties weaken how much suppliers benefit from customer innovation knowledge because of worries about customer opportunism (the dark side of embedded ties). However, they uncover three moderating relationship and governance features that allow suppliers to overcome these dark-side effects and even increase innovation (the bright side of embedded ties). Finally, although the authors predicted a bright-side effect, they find that embedded ties neither help nor hinder the supplier to leverage its own innovation knowledge in the relationship.
Buildings are connected to multiple information systems such as Building Management Systems (BMS), Energy Management Systems (EMS), Internet of Things (IoT) devices, Building Information Models ...(BIM), electricity grid, weather services, etc. Modern data-driven smart building software applications demand seamless integration of the above systems and their data. These applications range from monitoring and analytics to data-driven real-time control of building assets and are only efficient if they are reusable, modular and scalable. However, the lack of a system architecture with well-defined Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that integrates the above systems to provide access to systems and their data poses a significant challenge for developing and deploying such reusable, modular and scalable applications. With the absence of such architecture, the existing applications often rely on ad-hoc tooling, repetitive methods and inefficient data handling practices. In response to the challenges outlined above, this article presents the design and implementation of a system architecture with data-driven smart building applications in mind. The architecture aims to improve the overall reusability, modularity and scalability of smart building applications. The proposed system architecture relies on the Zachman framework and consists of services in five categories, i.e., 1) legacy systems, 2) modern applications, 3) third-party systems, 4) integration software, 5) databases, and 6) user interfaces. The proposed architecture closely resembles the MACH architectural principles: a) Microservices; b) Application Programming Interfaces (API)-first (exposing functionality via APIs), c) Cloud-based components, and d) Headless principles (front-end and back-end logic are decoupled). The proposed architecture is implemented as a proof-of-concept along with three smart building applications, namely 1) a Digital Twin application integrating sensor data with a BIM model, 2) a web application integrating real-time sensor data with semantic graphs, and 3) a data exploratory tool using sensor data, the Brick ontology and Grafana dashboards. Future implementations also include real-time control applications. The proposed architecture and the implementations show a reusable, modular and scalable architecture blueprint that can be used to develop similar architectures for the smart building domain.
•Current manual activities related to contract compliance are inefficient, cause trust issues and incur conflicts.•The acquisition and processing of physical asset data is (semi) automated using a ...mobile QR application.•A semi-automated comparison between the as-planned and as-built state of assets is realized by means of smart contracts.•The execution of tokenized payments on Ethereum between stakeholders is semiautomated and verified in various scenarios.•An immutable distributed record of construction activities and token transactions is embedded on a blockchain network.
Construction supply chains (CSC) are characterized by their converging structure and the hierarchical payment system which is inherently related. Due to the pursuit of diverging goals and mutual interdependencies, risks and trust problems between stakeholders occur. Contracts are used to govern these complex collaborations. To track compliance to contract terms, various activities are executed by involved stakeholders. These activities do not add any value to an end-product, cause intransparency, are costly and cause conflicts. Therefore, a combination of asset tracking and blockchain technology is investigated in this paper to address these problems. A plug-and-play framework of interacting applications and a workflow to operate them are proposed. Proof of this concept is provided by developing prototypical applications and by testing them in various practice-based scenarios. Simplified asset tracking throughout supply chains was realized and linked to smart contracts. This resulted in semi-automated compliance tracking and an immutable record of transactions. Therefore, this work provides more insight into combining asset tracking and blockchain for compliance checking in the construction industry. By doing so, further automation of construction processes, increased transparency between stakeholders and a reduction of conflicts can be enabled. However, it remains clear that many other variables impact on transparency and trust; and while technology can make improvements, considerable procedural security and control measures are needed in addition. Therefore, we focus on semi-automation of workflows using distributed ledger technology.
An increasing number of information management and information exchange applications in construction industry is relying on semantic web technologies or tools from the Linked Open Data (LOD) domain ...to support data interoperability, flexible data exchange, distributed data management and the development of reusable tools. These goals tend to be overlapped with the purposes of the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), which is a standard for the construction industry defined through an EXPRESS schema. A connecting point between semantic web technologies and the IFC standard would be represented by an agreed Web Ontology Language (OWL) ontology for IFC (termed ifcOWL) that allows to (1) keep on using the well-established IFC standard for representing construction data, (2) exploit the enablers of semantic web technologies in terms of data distribution, extensibility of the data model, querying, and reasoning, and (3) re-use general purpose software implementations for data storage, consistency checking and knowledge inference. Therefore, in this paper we will look into existing efforts in obtaining an ifcOWL ontology from the EXPRESS schemas of IFC and analyse which features would be required in a usable and recommendable ifcOWL ontology. In making this analysis, we present our implementations of an EXPRESS-to-OWL converter and the key features of the resulting ifcOWL ontology.
•The added value of an ifcOWL ontology is outlined.•The key characteristics of the EXPRESS data modelling language are documented.•A procedure is proposed to convert the IFC EXPRESS schema to an ifcOWL ontology.•Indications are provided of how RDF graphs can be built with this ifcOWL ontology.•The proposed procedure and results are compared in detail with existing proposals.
Over the recent years, the usage of semantic web technologies has notably increased in the domains of architecture, engineering and construction (AEC). These technologies are typically considered as ...complementary to existing and often used Building Information Modelling (BIM) software. The usage of these technologies in the AEC domains is thereby motivated by (1) a desire to overcome the interoperability issue among software tools used in diverse disciplines, or at least improve information exchange processes; (2) a desire to connect to various domains of application that have opportunities to identify untapped valuable resources closely linked to the information already obtained in the AEC domains; and/or (3) a desire to exploit the logical basis of these technologies, which is currently undisclosed in the AEC domains. Through an extensive literature study and survey, this article investigates the development and application progress of semantic web technologies in the AEC domains in accordance with these three primary perspectives. These examinations and analyses provide a complete strategical map that can serve as a robust stepping stone for future research regarding the application of semantic web technologies in the AEC domains. Results show that semantic web technologies have a key role to play in logic-based applications and applications that require information from multiple application areas (e.g. BIM + Infra + GIS + Energy). Notwithstanding fast developments and hard work, challenging research opportunities are situated in (1) the creation and maintenance of the links between the various data sets and in (2) devising beneficial implementation approaches that rely on appropriate combinations of declarative and procedural programming techniques, semantic and legacy data formats, user input, and automated procedures.
•Review papers reveal use cases that can be addressed with semantic web technologies.•A literature review reveals the proposed benefits of semantic web technologies.•Benefits are situated in interoperability, linking data, and logical inference.•Key example studies are documented in support of these three topical axes.•An indication is given of industrial value for each of these topical axes.
Three-dimensional (3-D) geometry can be described in many ways, with both a varying syntax and a varying semantics. As a result, several very diverse schemas and file formats can be deployed to ...describe geometry, depending on the application domain in question. In a multidisciplinary domain such as the domain of architecture, engineering, and construction, this range of specialized schemas makes file format conversions inevitable. The approach adopted by current conversion tools, however, often results in a loss of information, most often due to a “mistranslation” between different syntaxes and/or semantics, leading to errors and limitations in the design conception stage and to inefficiency due to the required remodeling efforts. An approach based on semantic web technology may reduce the loss of information significantly, leading to an improved processing of 3-D information and hence to an improved design practice in the architecture, engineering, and construction domain. This paper documents our investigation of the nature of this 3-D information conversion problem and how it may be encompassed using semantic web technology. In an exploratory double test case, we show how the specific deployment of semantic rule languages and an appropriate inference engine are to be adopted to improve this 3-D information exchange. It shows how semantic web technology allows the coexistence of diverse descriptions of the same 3-D information, interlinked through explicit conversion rules. Although only a simple example is used to document the process, and a more in-depth investigation is needed, the initial results indicate the suggested approach to be a useful alternative approach to obtain an improved 3-D information exchange.
Purpose - The first objective was to find out to what extent consumers reveal an effect of strategic and tactical cause-related marketing on brand loyalty. Second, the article seeks to assess the ...moderating role of consumer involvement with a product on the relationship between cause-related marketing and brand loyalty.Design methodology approach - An experimental design with 240 participants was used.Findings - The results show that consumers perceive a significantly enhanced level of brand loyalty as a result of strategic cause-related marketing as long as the firm has a long-term commitment to this campaign and the campaign is related to a low involvement product. Consumers do not exhibit a significant impact of tactical cause-related marketing campaigns - whether related to high or low involvement products - on brand loyalty.Research limitations implications - First, all respondents were students from a western European university. Second, the experiment relied on imaginary storyboards. Third, the program dimensions were not manipulated separately.Practical implications - If companies intend to increase brand loyalty through CRM they should set up long-lasting CRM campaigns linked to the product that shows the lowest level of consumer involvement.Originality value - The added value of this paper is the link between cause-related marketing programs and brand loyalty. Moreover, a distinction is explicitly made between tactical and strategic CRM programs.
The selected papers address various aspects, including a translation approach between BIM and building energy modeling, a practical method with application to facility management (FM) using 2D ...barcodes and BIM technologies, a BIM-based virtual environment for fire emergency evacuation, a BIM data application to building performance simulation software for the early phases of building design, and a BIM-based approach in construction to support the construction procurement process. ...A. A. Costa and A. Grilo, in their paper titled "BIM-Based E-Procurement: An Innovative Approach to Construction E-Procurement," describe a particular BIM application with an approach to e-procurement in construction, which uses BIM to support the construction procurement process.
Despite the widespread usage of Building Information Modeling (BIM) based simulation in the construction industry, robot construction simulation environments are built on particular modeling tools ...and can only be simulated with certain robot models. This not only limits construction robot development and also makes it difficult to directly share building information with robots, which impedes the study of robotic construction. To overcome this problem, we propose a new framework for robotic construction simulation which integrates open standard formats and tools to achieve a commonly used robot simulation environment. This provides a new approach to automatically convert IFC to simulation description format (SDF) and generate building components as smart components, which eliminates platform-specific limitations on robotic construction simulation, which further expands the utilization of BIM models.
•An approach is proposed to the application of IFC-based BIM model in robotic simulation.•An automated ETL procedure is proposed for converting IFC models to SDF models.•Construction robot execution is simulated using a smart component-oriented construction planning system.•The robot simulation framework is tested to demonstrate the process of on-site robot construction simulation.•Additional types of robots and buildings can be integrated in the IFC-based robot construction simulator.
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