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.
Formal Specification of Memory Coherence Protocol
Memory coherence is the most fundamental re-quirement in a shared virtual memory system where there are concurrent as well as loosely coupled processes. These processes can demand a page for reading or writing. The memory is called coherent if the last update in a page remains constant for each process until the owner of that page does not change it. The ownership is transferred to a process interested to update that page. In [Kai LI, and Paul Hudak. Memory Coherence in Shared Virtual Memory Systems, 1986. Proc. of Fifth Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing.], algorithms ensuring memory coherence are given. We formally specify these protocols and report the improvements through formal analysis. The protocols are specified in UPPAAL, i.e., a tool for modeling, validation and verification of real-time systems.
Standardization of Structural BIM
The BIM standard establishes standard definitions for building information exchanges to support critical business contexts using standard semantics and ontologies. This Standard forms the foundation for accurate and efficient communication and commerce that are needed by the construction industry. The Standard is still in its infancy and the evolution and maturity of BIM Standard will depend largely on the efforts and contribution of various disciplines involved in design, construction, and management of a facility. This paper focuses on advancing standardization of BIM model for structural analysis and design. Specifically speaking, the paper addresses The Information Delivery Manual (IDM) as it aims to provide the integrated reference for process and data required by BIM by identifying the discrete processes undertaken within structural design, the information required for their execution and the results of that activity. Furthermore, it will address Model View Definitions (MVDs) for structural design and analysis to create a robust process for seamless, efficient, reproducible exchange of accurate and reliable structural information that is widely and routinely acknowledged by the industry.