Architectural Rules Research Articles

Amendments to the architectural and industrial maintenance (AIM) rule 1113

Amendments to the architectural and industrial maintenance (AIM) rule 1113

Downtown Mexico City: An Experience Teaching Open Building

After more than five years of teaching Open Building to students in the last year of their architectural training we have learned one thing: it is easier to master the Open Building methodologies if we first apply some of its main ideas to extract the urban and architectural rules from the reality and only afterwards, students have an easier time learning and applying the methodology to make new OB design proposals. To achieve this we work either in downtown Mexico City or in other Mexican colonial cities where the historical urban fabric provides an easier reading of the urban and architectural typologies. In this article I am going to talk about our last year's teaching experience and the results we achieved. There are three main objectives to be met in this last year of architectural training. The main one is to deal with socially relevant problems that involve real communities. The second one is that the teaching resembles the practice of architecture as much as possible. And one that we have added to the curricula is to train students to understand, learn and apply OB ideas in their urban and architectural work. Architectural competitions have turned into important part of the practice. For that reason we encourage students to enter at least one of the multiple options that occur during the year. This time there was the opportunity to enter a competition aimed for students organized by ARQUINE (a well known international trimester architectural publication). The competition objective was to design studios and housing for art students in an empty lot in historical downtown Mexico City. To achieve the objectives of the course, as well as to participate in the competition, we divided the course in three parts. In the first part students made an urban diagnosis of the area, a site analysis and a design proposal for the competition. In the second part they studied traditional housing vecindades as well as the families living in that particular area. They applied the support idea to these typologies to get acquainted with the generals of the method. In the third part they studied the methodology thoroughly to be able to design a support building to relocate the studied families. In the end, each student designed a different support building in an empty lot nearby to the studied area. In our experience, students are very enthusiastic and responsible when working with users and applying OB ideas. Most students from this last generation are now working in housing related agencies. Two of these students work for the Mexican Architectural Association and recently promoted a new competition jointly with the local government Program of Housing Improvement. The competition goal is to design incremental housing in the periphery or in downtown areas, avoiding prototypes. They are strongly supporting the use of OB ideas for the competition and this year's students will participate in it.

Physiological integration affects growth form and competitive ability in clonal plants

Clonal plants translocate resources through spacers between ramets. Translocation can be advantageous if a plant occurs in heterogeneous environments (‘division of labour’); however, because plants interact locally, any spatial arrangement of ramets generates some heterogeneity in light and nutrients even if there is no external heterogeneity. Thus the capacity of a clonal plant to exploit heterogeneous environment must operate in an environment where heterogeneity is partly shaped by the plant growth itself. Since most experiments use only simple systems of two connected ramets, plant-level effects of translocation are unknown. A spatially explicit simulation model of clonal plant growth, competition and translocation is used to identify whether different patterns of translocation have the potential to affect the growth form of the plant and its competitive ability. The results show that different arrangements of translocation sinks over the spacer system can completely alter clonal morphology. Both runners and clumpers can be generated using the same architectural rules by changing translocation only. The effect of translocation strongly interacts with the architectural rules of the plant growth: plants with ramets staying alive when a spacer is formed are much less sensitive to change in translocation than plants with ramets only at the tip. If translocation cost is low, translocating plants are in most cases better competitors than plants that do not translocate; the difference becomes stronger in more productive environments. Key traits that confer competitive ability are total number of ramet, and their fine-scale aggregation.

From problem to solution with quality attributes and design aspects

It is commonly accepted that quality attributes shape the architecture of a system. There are several means via which the architecture can support certain quality attributes. For example, to deal with reliability the system can be decomposed into a number of fault containment units, thus avoiding fault propagation. In addition to structural issues of architecture, qualities also influence architectural rules and guidelines, such as coding standards. In this paper we will focus on design aspects as a means of supporting quality attributes. An example of a design aspect is error handling functionality, which supports reliability. Quality attributes play a role in the problem domain; design aspects are elements in the solution domain. We will use an industrial case to illustrate our ideas. The discussion ranges from how design aspects are defined in the architecture based on quality attributes, to how design aspects can be used to verify the realized system against the prescribed architecture. The industrial case is a product family of medical imaging systems. For this product family, the family members are constructed from a component-based platform. Here, it is especially useful to achieve aspect-completeness of components, allowing system composition without worrying about individual design aspects.

New approach to software architecture

Software architecture aims at providing a high-level structure (blueprint) to be used by both the developer as well as the stakeholders. The blueprint consists of components and connectors. Certain combinations of these components and connectors yield the best design results. Vastushastra, an Indian building science, consists of patterns. It lays a set of building architectural rules that, when followed, offers quality of life. As a first attempt of our research, we propose applying the well-structured and proven results of Vastushastra to one of component of Software Architecture, Quality Trade-off.

Impact of zinc roofing on urban runoff pollutant loads: the case of Paris

Previous research on the Marais catchment in Paris demonstrated the very high zinc and cadmium contamination of runoff from zinc roofing. Thus further investigations were aimed at evaluating the relative importance of this type of roofing in Paris and its potential contribution to zinc and cadmium loads in wet weather flows. According to these results, about 40% of the surface of roofs in Paris is covered with rolled zinc (1016 ha), and this proportion is not likely to vary significantly in the next years, due to architectural rules. The Zn and Cd concentrations measured in runoff from these roofs are in accordance with literature

The Architecture of the Shops and Colonnaded Street in Petra

During the Nabataean period, along the main street of the city center various clusters of shops were built, using the rules of vernacular architecture. During the early second century C. E., these were enlarged and acquired a wide portico which considerably narrowed the early street, while the street itself was paved with dense stone cobbles. At least one shop was used as a tavern. The use of the shops continued during the Byzantine period, with more structures built inside the south colonnaded sidewalk. In addition to the examination of the architectural details, this paper discusses aspects of town planning during the evolution of the street and the expansion of the city center to the east.

A simulation study of the effects of architectural constraints and resource translocation on population structure and competition in clonal plants

(1) Spatially explicit simulation of clonal plant growth is used to determine how rametlevel traits affect ramet density, spatial pattern of ramets and competitive ability of a clonal plant. The simulation model used combines elements of (i) an individual-based model of plant interactions, (ii) an architectural model of clonal plant growth, and (iii) a model of resource translocation within a set of physiologically integrated plant individuals. (2) The effects of two groups of parameters were studied: growth and resource acquisition parameters (resource accumulation, density-dependence of resource accumulation, resource translocation between ramets) and architectural rules (branching angle and probability of branching, internode length). The model was parameterised by values approximating those of clonally growing grasses as closely as possible. The basic parameter values were chosen from a short-turf grassland. Sensitivity analysis was carried out on relevant parameters around three basic points in the parameter space. Both single-species and two-species systems were studied. (3) It is shown that increasing resource acquisition and growth parameters increase ramet density, genet number and competitive ability. Translocation parameters and architectural parameters modify the effects of resource acquisition and growth, but their effect in single-species stands was smaller. (4) The simulations of species with fixed ramet sizes showed that ramet density in single-species stands cannot be used for predicting competitive ability. Increase in resource acquisition and growth parameters was correlated with an increase in equilibrium ramet density and competitive ability. Increasing branching angle, branching probability or internode length lead to an increased competitive ability, but did not affect equilibrium ramet density. Change of architectural parameters could therefore affect competitive ability independently of their effect on the final ramet density. (5) Spatial pattern both in single-species and two-species stands was also highly parameter-dependent. Changes in architectural parameters and in translocation usually lead to pronounced change in the spatial pattern; change in growth and resource acquisition parameters generally had little effect on spatial pattern.

Languages for formalizing, visualizing and verifying software architectures

In this paper we describe languages for formalizing, visualizing and verifying software architectures. This helps us in solving two related problems: (1) the reconstruction of architectures of existing systems, and (2) the definition and verification of architectures of new systems. We define an expression language for formulating architectural rules, a graph language for visualizing various structures of design, and a dialogue language for interactively exercising the former two languages. We have applied these languages in a number of industrial cases.

Morphogenesis and tissue engineering of bone and cartilage: inductive signals, stem cells, and biomimetic biomaterials.

Morphogenesis is the developmental cascade of pattern formation, body plan establishment, and the architecture of mirror-image bilateral symmetry of many structures and asymmetry of some, culminating in the adult form. Tissue engineering is the emerging discipline of design and construction of spare parts for the human body to restore function based on principles of molecular developmental biology and morphogenesis governed by bioengineering. The three key ingredients for both morphogenesis and tissue engineering are inductive signals, responding stem cells, and the extracellular matrix. Among the many tissues in the human body, bone has considerable powers for regeneration and is a prototype model for tissue engineering based on morphogenesis. Implantation of demineralized bone matrix into subcutaneous sites results in local bone induction. This model mimics sequential limb morphogenesis and permitted the isolation of bone morphogens. Although it is traditional to study morphogenetic signals in embryos, bone morphogenetic proteins (BMPs), the inductive signals for bone, were isolated from demineralized bone matrix from adults. BMPs and related cartilage-derived morphogenetic proteins (CDMPs) initiate, promote, and maintain chondrogenesis and osteogenesis and have actions beyond bone. The symbiosis of bone inductive and conductive strategies are critical for tissue engineering, and is in turn governed by the context and biomechanics. The context is the microenvironment, consisting of extracellular matrix, which can be duplicated by biomimetic biomaterials such as collagens, hydroxyapatite, proteoglycans, and cell adhesion proteins including fibronectins. Thus, the rules of architecture for tissue engineering are an imitation of the laws of developmental biology and morphogenesis, and thus may be universal for all tissues, including bones and joints.

景観シミュレーションCGのための建物壁面データの合成

For Computer Simulation of City Landscape, there is need for data of many buildings in the city. But data of these buildings were usually made simple volume figures. It cause to misunderstanding about scale of city. And we cannot know a standing point quickly to see a image or animation of simple volume figure for city landscape simulation. To avoid this problem, we try to synthesize data of building walls from parameters that are extracted from real image of building walls to use pattern matching with restriction based on architectural rules.

Presence and location of modified nucleotides in Escherichia coli tmRNA: structural mimicry with tRNA acceptor branches.

Escherichia coli tmRNA functions uniquely as both tRNA and mRNA and possesses structural elements similar to canonical tRNAs. To test whether this mimicry extends to post-transcriptional modification, the technique of combined liquid chromatography/ electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (LC/ESIMS) and sequence data were used to determine the molecular masses of all oligonucleotides produced by RNase T1 hydrolysis with a mean error of 0.1 Da. Thus, this allowed for the detection, chemical characterization and sequence placement of modified nucleotides which produced a change in mass. Also, chemical modifications were used to locate mass-silent modifications. The native E.coli tmRNA contains two modified nucleosides, 5-methyluridine and pseudouridine. Both modifications are located within the proposed tRNA-like domain, in a seven-nucleotide loop mimicking the conserved sequence of T loops in canonical tRNAs. Although tmRNA acceptor branches (acceptor stem and T stem-loop) utilize different architectural rules than those of canonical tRNAs, their conformations in solution may be very similar. A comparative structural and functional analysis of unmodified tmRNA made by in vitro transcription and native E.coli tmRNA suggests that one or both of these post-transcriptional modifications may be required for optimal stability of the acceptor branch which is needed for efficient aminoacylation.

Evolution of a Rapidly Learned Representation for Speech

Newly born infants are able to finely discriminate almost all human speech contrasts and their phonemic category boundaries are initially identical, even for phonemes outside their target language. A connectionist model is described, which accounts for this ability. The approach taken has been to develop a model of innately guided learning in which an artificial neural network (ANN) is stored in a ''genome" which encodes its architecture and learning rules. The space of possible ANNs is searched with a genetic algorithm for networks that can learn to discriminate human speech sounds. These networks perform equally well when they have been trained on speech spectra from any human language so far tested (English, Cantonese, Swahili, Farsi, Czech, Hindi, Hungarian, Korean, Polish, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Ukranian, and Urdu). Training the evolved networks requires exposure to just two minutes of speech in any of these languages. Categorisation of speech sounds based on the network representations shows the hallmarks of categorical perception. Phoneme confusability in the network replicates earlier studies of phoneme confusability in adults. The network model offers an epigenetic account of the rapid emergence of speech perception skills in young infants whereby innately specified neural systems exploit regularities in the speech signal to construct representations that are well-suited to the identification of speech segments. The model also suggests how infants' early preferential attention to speech is driven by the rapid construction of suitable representations.

Role of morphogenetic proteins in skeletal tissue engineering and regeneration.

Morphogenesis is the developmental cascade of pattern formation and body plan establishment, culminating in the adult form. It has formed the basis for the emerging discipline of tissue engineering, which uses principles of molecular developmental biology and morphogenesis gleaned through studies on inductive signals, responding stem cells, and the extracellular matrix to design and construct spare parts that restore function to the human body. Among the many organs in the body, bone has considerable powers for regeneration and is a prototype model for tissue engineering. Implantation of demineralized bone matrix into subcutaneous sites results in local bone induction. This model mimics sequential limb morphogenesis and has permitted the isolation of bone morphogens, such as bone morphogenetic proteins (BMPs), from demineralized adult bone matrix. BMPs initiate, promote, and maintain chondrogenesis and osteogenesis, but are also involved in the morphogenesis of organs other than bone. The symbiosis of the mechanisms underlying bone induction and differentiation is critical for tissue engineering and is governed by both biomechanics (physical forces) and context (microenvironment/extracellular matrix), which can be duplicated by biomimetic biomaterials such as collagens, hydroxyapatite, proteoglycans, and cell adhesion glycoproteins, including fibronectins and laminin. Rules of tissue architecture elucidated in bone morphogenesis may provide insights into tissue engineering and be universally applicable for all organs/tissues, including bones and joints.

Hebbian learning in parallel and modular memories.

Many cognitive and sensorimotor functions in the brain involve parallel and modular memory subsystems that are adapted by activity-dependent Hebbian synaptic plasticity. This is in contrast to the multilayer perceptron model of supervised learning where sensory information is presumed to be integrated by a common pool of hidden units through backpropagation learning. Here we show that Hebbian learning in parallel and modular memories is more advantageous than backpropagation learning in lumped memories in two respects: it is computationally much more efficient and structurally much simpler to implement with biological neurons. Accordingly, we propose a more biologically relevant neural network model, called a tree-like perceptron, which is a simple modification of the multilayer perceptron model to account for the general neural architecture, neuronal specificity, and synaptic learning rule in the brain. The model features a parallel and modular architecture in which adaptation of the input-to-hidden connection follows either a Hebbian or anti-Hebbian rule depending on whether the hidden units are excitatory or inhibitory, respectively. The proposed parallel and modular architecture and implicit interplay between the types of synaptic plasticity and neuronal specificity are exhibited by some neocortical and cerebellar systems.

CLIN-S - A Semantically Guided First-Order Theorem Prover

CLIN-S is an instance-based, clause-form first-order theorem prover. CLIN-S employs three inference procedures: semantic hyper-linking, which uses semantics to guide the proof search and performs well on non-Horn parts of the proofs involving small literals, rough resolution, which removes large literals in the proofs, and UR resolution, which proves the Horn parts of the proofs. A semantic structure for the input clauses is given as input. During the search for the proof, ground instances of the input clauses are generated and new semantic structures are built based on the input semantics and a model of the ground clause set. A proof is found if the ground clause set is unsatisfiable. In this article, we describe the system architecture and major inference rules used in CLIN-S.

Graph-based rules and transactions for parallel and active database systems

Active database management systems are becoming increasingly popular because of their relevance to several advanced and complex database applications. The need for user-defined execution orders (or control structures) for rules is well recognized by researchers of active database management systems. Priority-based approaches (e.g., numeric priorities) have been used to specify a desired control structure among rules. However, due to the fact that fixed priorities are assigned to rules, independent of different contexts in which they may be triggered, the existing approaches are not able to allow rules to be executed following different control structures when they are triggered by different events. More flexible and expressive control mechanisms are often needed for rules in advanced database applications such as CAD/CAM, CASE, CIM and flexible manufacturing systems. Since rules in database environments are executed in a transaction framework, an expressive transaction model is needed to model complex control structures among rulesuniformly. In this work, we separate the event part from the condition-action parts of a rule and associate it with a rule graph which represents a set of rules (actually a set of condition-action pairs) sharing the same control structure. Different rule graphs can be defined under different event specifications thereby enabling a set of rules to follow different control structures when triggered by different events. We also use an expressive graph-based transaction model to incorporate the control structures of rule graphs uniformly in a transaction framework. The proposed rule and transaction modeling and execution techniques have been implemented and verified on a shared-nothing multiprocessor computer nCUBE2. In this paper, we also describe the client-server architecture and different parallel transaction and rule execution techniques that have been used for the implementation. Finally, we analyze the speedup and scaleup of the implemented system.

Multiple-block ahead branch predictors

A basic rule in computer architecture is that a processor cannot execute an application faster than it fetches its instructions. This paper presents a novel cost-effective mechanism called the two-block ahead branch predictor. Information from the current instruction block is not used for predicting the address of the next instruction block, but rather for predicting the block following the next instruction block.This approach overcomes the instruction fetch bottle-neck exhibited by wide-dispatch "brainiac" processors by enabling them to efficiently predict addresses of two instruction blocks in a single cycle. Furthermore, pipelining the branch prediction process can also be done by means of our predictor for "speed demon" processors to achieve higher clock rate or to improve the prediction accuracy by means of bigger prediction structures.Moreover, and unlike the previously-proposed multiple predictor schemes, multiple-block ahead branch predictors can use any of the branch prediction schemes to perform the very accurate predictions required to achieve high-performance on superscalar processors.

Multiple-block ahead branch predictors

A basic rule in computer architecture is that a processor cannot execute an application faster than it fetches its instructions. This paper presents a novel cost-effective mechanism called the two-block ahead branch predictor. Information from the current instruction block is not used for predicting the address of the next instruction block, but rather for predicting the block following the next instruction block.This approach overcomes the instruction fetch bottle-neck exhibited by wide-dispatch "brainiac" processors by enabling them to efficiently predict addresses of two instruction blocks in a single cycle. Furthermore, pipelining the branch prediction process can also be done by means of our predictor for "speed demon" processors to achieve higher clock rate or to improve the prediction accuracy by means of bigger prediction structures.Moreover, and unlike the previously-proposed multiple predictor schemes, multiple-block ahead branch predictors can use any of the branch prediction schemes to perform the very accurate predictions required to achieve high-performance on superscalar processors.

A symbolic framework for the description of tree architecture models

Abstract The system of tree architecture proposed by Halle and Oldeman consists of 23 models named after botanists playing leading roles in elucidating tree architecture. This system gives no indication why other models do not occur. A symbolism is presented here which can serve as a shorthand in recording tree architectures without assumptions about models, and immediately interpretable. Using this symbolism to represent the models proposed by Halle and Oldeman permits creation of general rules of tree architecture, some of which raise interesting theoretical questions. Two further tree models that might well be expected to exist and several which would not be expected, are described.