Foundation of a Framework to Support Compliance Checking in Construction Industry
Computer use is pervasive in our daily life and the increasing demand for computer applications has penetrated into various domains. Construction industry has become one of domains which are more reliable on the application of computer to implement regulatory compliance checking. Like many safety critical domains, the construction domain has its own set of international building codes on construction projects which must comply with. With the increasing complexity of construction projects, many manual compliance checking techniques have shown some serious issues. First, the manual techniques are error-prone due to human errors. Second, the complexity of a construction project exceeds the human limit to deal with. Third, the evolution of a construction project is inevitable and the human maintenance of a construction project is almost impossible because either the memory of the original project design has faked away or some development team members are gone. So, it has become a new trend to employ computers to support automatic regulatory compliance checking in construction industry. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to support compliance checking with the emphasis on the foundation of automatic regulatory compliance checking to certify whether a construction project complies with some international building codes. An example is illustrated how compliance checking is performed in the framework.
Reflection on integrity management
15 This reflection aims to investigate the integrity-related risks for companies engaging with 16 third parties in the construction and civil engineering industry. The business partner 17 compliance process of a multinational construction engineering company is assessed 18 through internal interviews with integrity officers per business sector and per region in a 19 static and dynamic strategy framework. The actual process is the internal evaluation of a 20 ready-made tool bought from a service supplier that assess how the risks related to 21 corruption are covered in order to determine the level of due diligence necessary when 22 This material may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the American Society of Civil Engineers. This material may be found at https://doi.org/10.1061/(ASCE)LA.1943-4170.0000435. engaging with a specific third party. This study finds that companies must involve their 23 own experts to improve integrity tools. Collecting expert opinions on risk is necessary to 24 allow an improved understanding of the scope of the tool. This study reflects on new ways 25 for improving the integrity tool and demonstrates the necessity to cover risks not solely 26 associated with Corruption & Bribery, but also with Human Rights, Conflict of Interest, 27 Antitrust & Competition, as well as Compliance with Regulations to fully protect 28 company’s integrity. 29
A model for predicting heat transfer through gypsum‐board/wood‐stud walls exposed to fire
To facilitate the development of cost-effective and flexible design options there is a need to develop models to predict the fire resistance of wood-frame building assemblies. Such assemblies often derive much of their fire resistance from a protective membrane composed of gypsum board. A simple two-dimensional computer model is presented to predict heat transfer through gypsum-board/wood-stud walls exposed to fire. Input data for the thermophysical properties of gypsum board were measured exploying standard bench-scale tests. Input data for wood were selected from the literature. Small-and full-scale fire resistance tests were conducted on gypsum-board/wood-stud wall assemblies to provide data for the validation of the model. The model is shown to predict heat transfer through these walls rather well.