Solutions In Early Stages Research Articles

Decision Support for existing buildings: an LCC-based proposal for facade retrofitting technological choices

The goal of this paper is to present a usable and effective tool to evaluate residential façade retrofitting solutions in early stages of design, keeping into account envelope features and installation issues. Decarbonisation goals set for 2050 impose existing building stock renovation and energy retrofit. Several drivers are available in EU Countries to trigger these operations. Nonetheless, the renovation rate in EU Member States remains low: barriers to building retrofit are identified, and a main issue in this sense is the lack of use of Decision Support Systems. DSS exist but are often neglected by building designers or owners, due to different reasons. Existing methodologies do not take into account the quantity and quality of information available at the various stages of building life cycle; furthermore, they mainly focus on energy related aspects, neglecting technological and installation related factors. This paper aims at providing an LCC-based decision framework to help decision makers in early stages of design to choose the most suitable technology for building façade retrofitting. A Utility Function expressing LCC for residential building renovation is provided, focusing on façades renovation and on installation and morphology related aspects. Information and data flow through the phases is presented and discussed, showing how the proposed method can be adapted to different stages, and testing its robustness through sensitivity and uncertainty analyses. Three main categories of renovation technologies are analysed (ventilated façade, ETICS, and prefabricated solutions). The proposed method is applied to a residential case study building. The adaptability of the tool to different stages of design is discussed, and further potential applications are presented.

ClusFuDE: Forecasting low dimensional numerical data using an improved method based on automatic clustering, fuzzy relationships and differential evolution

In this paper, a novel hybrid model for forecasting low dimensional numerical data is proposed which is named as ClusFuDE. The proposed method uses an improved automatic clustering approach for clustering the historical numerical data. Further fuzzy logical relationships are used to forecast the approximate values which are then defuzzified to calculate the exact forecasted values of the data. The fuzzy logical relationships are useful in modelling the fuzzy relations and help in forecasting the fuzzy time series data in a very simplified manner. The forecasted sub-optimal candidate solutions are optimized using Differential Evolution. The Differential Evolution method uses a dynamic differential crossover rate (Cri) for the ith solution, for identifying and discarding suboptimal candidate solutions in early stages of the iterative run. This makes the method more suitable for iterative modification of candidate solutions by using differential mutation and crossover, and suitable for global search. The proposed method is applied for forecasting, the year wise enrollments of the University of Alabama, Lahi (crop) production, monthly amount of outpatients visit in a hospital, inventory demand and population of India from years 1930–2000 and the results are consistent. We have compared our method with the recent forecasting methods available in literature and the proposed method outperforms all the existing methods in the literature. The accuracy of the proposed method is computed by calculating the Mean square error (MSE) and Mean Absolute percentage error (MAPE). The proposed method provides the lowest MSE and MAPE when compared to all other methods available in the literature.

Load-displacement and upper-bound solutions of a loaded laterally pile in clay based on a total-displacement-loading EMSD method

A total-displacement-loading approach based on the extended mobilisable strength design (EMSD) method is developed for predicting nonlinear foundation responses and upper-bound capacities with continuous velocity fields. Different from EMSD, the new approach turns optimizing a minimum energy solution into solving an elastic problem with strain-dependent equivalent elastic modulus. The strain-dependent modulus is determined by a nonlinear iterative method. This transform guarantees that the reaction force is consistent with the elastic solution in early stages of loading and gradually approaches an upper-bound solution at a large value of displacement. The approach is demonstrated on a problem of the laterally loaded pile.

Adoption of new transport technology: a quick scan approach

Quick scan methods aim at a fast and transparent analysis of alternative solutions to planning problems in a situation of shortage of information. They generate new knowledge about solutions in early stages of decision-making and in ‘creative experiments’ in scenario analysis. The importance of quick scan methods is growing within the trend toward more flexible and interactive approaches in decision-making in policy and planning. This article presents a quick scan of alternative technology options to transport problems, in view of their adoption in the market The technologies involved represent sound efforts to contribute to energy efficiency and a reduction of air pollutants. The perspective used in this quick scan is spatial by emphasising the influence of spatial settlement patterns in scenario thinking on future transport.

Effects of mineral precipitation on the sulfur isotope composition of hydrothermal solutions

The effect of precipitation of mineral phases on the sulfur isotopic composition of hydrothermal minerals is quantitatively evaluated in terms of a Rayleigh distillation process. The precipitation of either sulfate or sulfide minerals is considered as the removal mechanism for dissolved sulfur from a finite solution reservoir. The isotopic composition of sulfur in hydrothermal minerals is strongly controlled by the fraction of sulfur remaining in the solution as well as by the relative proportions of oxidized to reduced sulfur compounds. When sulfate is precipitated from a SO 2− 4-dominant solution with minor amounts of H 2S, its δ 34S-value can change, with time, from slightly greater than that of the original solution in early stages to significantly lower than that of the original solution in late stages. Conversely, when sulfide minerals are deposited from a H 2S-dominant solution with minor amounts of SO 2− 4, their δ 34S-values may resemble the δ 34S-value of the original solution in early stages, but may change to values remarkably higher than that of the original solution in late stages. Sulfur and oxygen isotopic data for barite from the Bad Grund Pb-Zn deposit in the Harz Mountains, Germany, illustrate the application of the reservoir effect, and a few barites with low δ 34S-values are interpreted to represent the product of precipitation of the gangue mineral in late stages.