Civil Engineering Professionals Research Articles

Sustainable Development of a Build-Up Area Taking into Account the Environmental Safety in Urban Conditions

Introduction. The sustainable design system of a built-up area requires integration of many types of information and ensuring the constant involvement of users, community members and various specialists throughout a building’s life cycle. The holistic designing approach implies focusing on the functional relationship between different parts of a building or a building complex as a whole that increases the complexity of a project. The key principle underlying sustainable buildings is an integrated design process taking into account the principles of environmental safety.The present article focuses on the analysis of the managerial and organizational methodology used by the civil engineering professionals in the context of sustainable construction. The design, management and arrangement of a construction site for a building’s reconstruction or a large scale build-up within the urban area boundaries require the development of measures and solutions for the storage and use of toxic chemicals, allocating the places for hazardous wastes collection and disposal, wastewater treatment – the results of operation of a previous structure or a building complex. All these factors need appropriate monitoring, assessment of risks and measures of ecological recovery of a land plot, in cases when the original objects and territories change their functional designation and are rebuilt into objects having impact on the environment.Materials and Methods. The development of sustainable design principles for arranging a construction site of capital construction facility on the areas that were exposed to long-term impact during the previous buildings’ and structures’ operation requires working-out the algorithms, methodology for assessment and monitoring the environmental situation on a construction site. The implementation of the present solutions requires the analysis of the sources of pollution, the duration of exposure, the nature and degree of construction site’ soil layer pollution. The development of modern managerial, organisational and technological solutions will minimise the processes of territory recovery and create sustainable construction operations.Results. As a result of the conducted research there were developed: the algorithms for assessing the ecological state of a construction site soil layer, the recommendations on the methodology for a build-up area ecological state assessment and monitoring aimed at setting the sustainable design of the organisational and technological solutions within an investment and construction project.Discussion and Conclusions. The implementation of the sustainable design processes in the investment and construction project on a build-up area soil layer preservation, the monitoring and assessment of its state enable avoiding extra costs due to the absence of the need for soil reclamation and purchase of soil of a different chemical composition from that originally formed in a particular area, and due to ensuring maximum possible preservation of vegetation.

Role of Chemical based Inhibitors in Protecting the Concrete Structures from Corrosion: Present Status and Future Prospects

Building industry is a rapid growing worldwide because of urbanization. Concrete is a primary requirement in the construction of residential buildings, shopping malls, industry structures, etc. The life of a building mainly depends on the ingredients used in the concrete during the construction activity. However, the concrete structures undergo deterioration because of the presence of highly corrosive ions in the admixture after long term. If the corrosion of the steel rods is severe in concrete, the buildings may collapse at any time which will lead to heavy loss for human lives. In this regard, protection of steel embedded in concrete from the corrosive attack is an important issue among civil engineering professionals and chemists. For this purpose, the technologies related to the adoption of suitable composition of steel, suitable combination of ingredients in the concrete, change of processing parameters/methodologies, etc. are being worked out. Apart from this, suitable chemical inhibitors are being studied across the globe to overcome this corrosion problem in a greater extent. In this review article, the type of chemical inhibitors used in admixtures and their effective role in protecting the concrete structures are discussed. Based on this, suitable suggestions are also recommended for the benefit of the society.

Multi-Agent Systems for Resource Allocation and Scheduling in a Smart Grid.

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) have been seen as an attractive area of research for civil engineering professionals to subdivide complex issues. Based on the assignment's history, nearby agents, and objective, the agent intended to take the appropriate action to complete the task. MAS models complex systems, smart grids, and computer networks. MAS has problems with agent coordination, security, and work distribution despite its use. This paper reviews MAS definitions, attributes, applications, issues, and communications. For this reason, MASs have drawn interest from computer science and civil engineering experts to solve complex difficulties by subdividing them into smaller assignments. Agents have individual responsibilities. Each agent selects the best action based on its activity history, interactions with neighbors, and purpose. MAS uses the modeling of complex systems, smart grids, and computer networks. Despite their extensive use, MAS still confronts agent coordination, security, and work distribution challenges. This study examines MAS's definitions, characteristics, applications, issues, communications, and evaluation, as well as the classification of MAS applications and difficulties, plus research references. This paper should be a helpful resource for MAS researchers and practitioners. MAS in controlling smart grids, including energy management, energy marketing, pricing, energy scheduling, reliability, network security, fault handling capability, agent-to-agent communication, SG-electrical cars, SG-building energy systems, and soft grids, have been examined. More than 100 MAS-based smart grid control publications have been reviewed, categorized, and compiled.

Validating Resilience at University Scale with Future Civil Engineering and Construction Professionals

Validating Resilience at University Scale with Future Civil Engineering and Construction Professionals

The Application of Curriculum Ideological and Political Cases in the Teaching of Road Survey and Design

Ideological and political construction of curriculum is the key link to implement the fundamental task of moral education. Focusing on the training objectives of civil engineering professionals in the new era, combined with the teaching concepts of moral education and student-centered education, the teaching objectives for the course of road survey and design have been re-set. The implementation plan of ideological and political education has been put into practice by involving excellent engineering cases, stories of outstanding figures in this field, traffic accidents, design concepts and technological innovation to explore the methods of integrating ideological and political cases into curriculum teaching for a continuous improvement of the promotion of curriculum ideological and political education to the teaching quality of professional courses.

Research on Training Mode of Civil Engineering Professionals Based on School-enterprise Cooperation

Research on Training Mode of Civil Engineering Professionals Based on School-enterprise Cooperation

Research on BIM 5D in the Cultivation of Civil Engineering Professionals in Applied Undergraduate Colleges

Informatization is one of the main characteristics of the modern construction industry. As an important part of the construction industry, the application of BIM 5D has greatly promoted the transformation of the production mode in the construction field. The development of the construction industry is inseparable from the training of professional talents by universities. More and more universities are actively exploring the role of BIM 5D in the process of talent training. Based on the research on BIM 5D in the training of civil engineering professionals in applied undergraduate colleges in combination with examples, this research proposes that the teaching reform path should be guided by BIM 5D training courses to drive a series of main courses teaching reforms. With BIM as the characteristic of running a school, it provides ideas for the training of civil engineering professionals.

The Interaction of Civil Engineering Students in Group Work through the Social Network Analysis

A sustainable approach in the construction industry requires civil engineering professionals with technical and soft skills. Those skills complement each other and facilitate the professional to work effectively in multidisciplinary groups during the development of construction projects. Universities apply collaborative learning methods such as group work (GW) in the classroom to achieve these skills. There is disagreement on the best way to select the members of the GW to achieve their best performance, but it is clear that it should favor the interaction of diverse actors to promote the development of soft skills. A random or criteria-based selection could bring groups of people very close together, leading to the academic homogeneity of GW members and impairing performance and learning. Even the most alert instructors lack information about the closeness of their students, so they rely on their intuition without having tools that allow them to confirm their assumptions or relate them to GW performance. The objective of this paper was to discover the social structures within the classrooms and to identify the groups of people close by trust, knowledge, and informal conversation to relate them to their GW performance. For this purpose, a social network analysis (SNA) was applied to Civil Engineering degree students. In addition, a correlation analysis between SNA metrics and GW grades was performed. The results show that beyond the way in which members are selected, there is a social structure that affects such selection and GW performance. This study presents information that can be used for instructors for a better GW selection that propitiates the development of soft skills in Civil Engineering students.

Teaching Reform of Structural Mechanics and Countermeasure Analysis

“Structural mechanics” is a professional basic course for civil engineering majors in Chinese universities. With the renewal of engineering education concept and the continuous improvement of social requirements for civil engineering professionals, the traditional structural mechanics teaching has gradually been unable to meet the learning needs of students. Taking the engineering certification in the new period as the guidance direction, reforming the teaching of structural mechanics and creating the “golden course” of structural mechanics have become the focus of teaching reform of civil engineering specialty in colleges and universities. This paper starts from the analysis of the problems existing in the teaching of structural mechanics, focusing on the teaching reform countermeasures of structural mechanics course, hoping to further optimize the teaching system of structural mechanics in colleges and universities, and cultivate more high-quality talents of engineering specialty.

A INFLUÊNCIA DO PLANEJAMENTO A EXECUÇÃO DE OBRAS

Abstract: In civil construction there is a need to work with several interconnected areas for the success of the building. If there is no good planning can occur numerous setbacks and causing controversies such as: the high cost of building; unnecessary expenditure; non-compliance with deadlines; lack of feasibility of budget and laws; accidents; among other adversities that may arise. The objective of this work is to provide information to civil engineering professionals about the importance of the act of planning, when they require the necessary actions to carry out a satisfactory project, and when it aims at a project without negative impacts, thus generating interfaces for a possible intervention to minimize the occurrence of nonconformities, during the execution of the work. The methodology used is of a qualitative nature with the analysis of the project from the initial design to the final phase of the construction. The results obtained with the answers of solutions and questions for the professionals involved in the project are described in the course of this work.

Leadership Competencies for Construction Professionals as Identified by Construction Industry Executives

AbstractConstruction and civil engineering professionals are recognizing a growing need for increased professional development, namely, leadership development, within the industry. However, many ac...

Some Major Challenges Faced by Civil Engineering Professionals in the Execution of their Profession and the impact of the challenges to the Environment, Society and Economy of Developing Countries

Some Major Challenges Faced by Civil Engineering Professionals in the Execution of their Profession and the impact of the challenges to the Environment, Society and Economy of Developing Countries

Vision based pixel-level bridge structural damage detection using a link ASPP network

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) has greatly benefited from computer vision. Recently, deep learning approaches are widely used to accurately estimate the state of deterioration of infrastructure. In this work, we focus on the problem of bridge surface structural damage detection, such as delamination and rebar exposure. It is well known that the quality of a deep learning model is highly dependent on the quality of the training dataset. Bridge damage detection, our application domain, has the following main challenges: (i) labeling the damages requires knowledgeable civil engineering professionals, which makes it difficult to collect a large annotated dataset; (ii) the damage area could be very small, whereas the background area is large, which creates an unbalanced training environment; (iii) due to the difficulty to exactly determine the extension of the damage, there is often a variation among different labelers who perform pixel-wise labeling. In this paper, we propose a novel model for bridge structural damage detection to address the first two challenges. This paper follows the idea of an atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) module that is designed as a novel network for bridge damage detection. Further, we introduce the weight balanced Intersection over Union (IoU) loss function to achieve accurate segmentation on a highly unbalanced small dataset. The experimental results show that (i) the IoU loss function improves the overall performance of damage detection, as compared to cross entropy loss or focal loss, and (ii) the proposed model has a better ability to detect a minority class than other light segmentation networks.

Motivating Civil Engineering Students’ Creativity: Actor–Partner Interdependence Approach

AbstractCreativity is an important characteristic for civil engineering professionals and students when facing innovation challenges associated with construction engineering projects. Previous stud...

“We Will, Then We Can?” An APIM Approach for Motivating Creativity

Creativity is an important characteristic for civil engineering professionals and students in facing innovation challenges associated with construction/engineering projects. Past studies have not e...

Response of self-consolidating cement paste systems containing Acacia Nilotica Gum as an organic admixture

This research characterizes the gum obtained as a natural organic ooze-out from Acacia Nilotica trees, indigenously known as “Keekar”, through Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) and Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) experimental techniques. It reports the response of self-consolidating paste systems (SCPs) containing Acacia Nilotica Gum (AG) in powdered form in ratios of 0.33%, 0.66% and 1% by weight of cement. The results are of interest to construction and civil engineering professionals and showed that AG enhanced the viscosity of SCPs which in turn improves their stability. Also, AG addition increased the water demand, setting times and early age expansion of SCPs while the heat of hydration, density and compressive strength got reduced. Reduction in density is attributed to incorporation of air voids and this may be exploited in energy efficient infills of buildings and possible improved freeze-thaw resistance. Most of the lost compressive strength due to AG incorporation was regained with the addition of Secondary Raw Materials (SRMs) including fly ash (FA) and limestone powder (LSP).

텍스트마이닝 기반의 효율적인 장소 브랜드 이미지 강도 측정 방법

텍스트마이닝 기반의 효율적인 장소 브랜드 이미지 강도 측정 방법

Special Issue on Computational Approaches to Understand and Reduce Energy Consumption in the Built Environment

The purpose of this special issue is to collect and publish a representative set of manuscripts from the growing community of scholars developing computational approaches to understand and improve energy efficiency in buildings. We are grateful to the editors of the ASCE Journal of Computing of Civil Engineering for supporting this effort and to the academic community for the strong response to our call for papers. It is our hope that by collecting research on this topic, in this special issue the research community can identify synergies between disparate but related research topics, identify and develop new research collaborations, and, ultimately, allow research focused on understanding and reducing energy consumption in the built environment to evolve as a result. Residential and commercial buildings account for about 40% of all energy consumption in the United States. In dense urban settings this figure can increase to up to 80%. Achieving the challenge put forward by the current presidential administration of an 80% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 will largely have to come from reductions in energy use by buildings. The International Energy Agency’s (IEA) “Energy Technology Perspectives 2010” report describes that energy efficiency measures can make the largest contribution to reduce energy use over the next 40 years. Civil engineering professionals, being the designers, creators, and stewards of the built environment, will play a key role in the solutions to better understand and reduce energy use. We are excited by the range and diversity of the topics in the special issue, which are listed alphabetically by first author last name, as follows: • “Impact of Social Network Type and Structure on Modeling Normative Energy Use Behavior Interventions” by Kyle Anderson, SangHyun Lee, and Carol Menassa; • “Framework to Evaluate Energy-Saving Potential from Occupancy Interventions in Typical Commercial Buildings in the United States” by Elie Azar and Carol C. Menassa; • “Demonstrating the Impact of the Occupant on Building Performance” by Caroline Clevenger, John Haymaker, and Maral Jalili; • “Automated Diagnostics and Visualization of Potential Energy Performance Problems in Existing Buildings Using Energy Performance Augmented Reality Models” by Mani Golparvar-Fard and Youngjib Ham; • “Network Ecoinformatics: Development of a Social Ecofeedback System to Drive Energy Efficiency in Residential Buildings” by Rimas Gulbinas, Rishee K. Jain, John E. Taylor, Gabriel Peschiera, and Mani Golparvar-Fard; • “Human-Building Interaction Framework for Personalized Thermal Comfort-Driven Systems in Office Buildings” by Farrokh Jazizadeh, Ali Ghahramani, Burcin Becerik-Gerber, Tatiana Kichkaylo, and Michael Orosz; • “Data-Driven Benchmarking of Building Energy Efficiency Utilizing Statistical Frontier Models” by Amir Kavousian and Ram Rajagopal; • “Domain-Specific Querying Formalisms for Retrieving Information about HVAC Systems” by Xuesong Liu, Burcu Akinci, Mario Berges, and James H. Garrett Jr.; and • “Conceptual Framework to Optimize Building Energy Consumption by Coupling Distributed Energy Simulation and Occupancy Models” by Carol C. Menassa, Vineet R. Kamat, SangHyun Lee, Elie Azar, Chen Feng, and Kyle Anderson. In addition, a paper titled “CAD-Centric Attribution Methodology for Multidisciplinary Optimization Environments: Enabling Parametric Attribution for Efficient Design Space Formulation and Evaluation” by Benjamin Welle, John Haymaker, Martin Fischer, and Vladimir Bazjanac will be published in a forthcoming issue. We close this preamble with the hope that this special issue serves as an introduction and becomes one in a series of many future issues focused on special topics in this domain. The opportunity for research on computational approaches to understand and reduce energy consumption in the built environment is vast and research on the topic is nascent. As civil engineers we have a tremendous opportunity for our research to have an impact on an issue of both technological/scientific importance and societal importance. We hope that future special issues can address more specialized subtopics in detail as we work collectively to address energy consumption in the built environment.

Briefing: Corporate responsibility in infrastructure

In recent years, civil engineering and related professionals have begun to appreciate that the best projects take into consideration from the outset the impacts that they will have on communities through the whole project lifecycle. This means, implicitly, that projects must be developed taking into consideration the principles of corporate responsibility (CR). In February 2010, the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) sponsored a workshop in London, building on a regional workshop held in the Midlands in 2009, to consider why CR is important to the ICE and its members; to ask what leadership the ICE should provide on CR; and to ask what guidance the ICE should expect on these issues from its members. This briefing reports on the seminar and its outcome.

On Communicating the Uncertainty of Risk

There are now a number of guides to help civil engineering professionals communicate risk. However the available techniques to deliberate on, identify and manage risk still require development especially for dealing with uncertain open world ‘wicked’ problems with low probability and high impact as confirmed by a recent high level government review in the UK. A well known, but not well understood, paradox at the heart of practical life is that on the one hand we routinely make risky practical decisions perfectly well but on the other hand our judgements about statistically testable risks are sometimes significantly in error. We maintain that managing uncertainty is the key; that classifying uncertainty as either aleatoric or epistemic is insufficient; and that standard probability theory has to become an interval measure which we characterise as an ‘Italian Flag’. A framework is proposed, based on evidence theory, through which all types of uncertainties about risk can be expressed in a way which is simpler to communicate, easier to understand and hence is a basis for improved risk management