Concurrent multi-scale modeling of civil infrastructures for analyses on structural deteriorating—Part II : Model updating and verification

This paper is a continuation of the paper titled “Concurrent multi-scale modeling of civil infrastructure for analyses on structural deteriorating—Part I: Modeling methodology and strategy” with the emphasis on model updating and verification for the developed concurrent multi-scale model. The sensitivity-based parameter updating method was applied and some important issues such as selection of reference data and model parameters, and model updating procedures on the multi-scale model were investigated based on the sensitivity analysis of the selected model parameters. The experimental modal data as well as static response in terms of component nominal stresses and hot-spot stresses at the concerned locations were used for dynamic response- and static response-oriented model updating, respectively. The updated multi-scale model was further verified to act as the baseline model which is assumed to be finite-element model closest to the real situation of the structure available for the subsequent arbitrary numerical simulation. The comparison of dynamic and static responses between the calculated results by the final model and measured data indicated the updating and verification methods applied in this paper are reliable and accurate for the multi-scale model of frame-like structure. The general procedures of multi-scale model updating and verification were finally proposed for nonlinear physical-based modeling of large civil infrastructure, and it was applied to the model verification of a long-span bridge as an actual engineering practice of the proposed procedures.

Risk assessment in life-cycle costing for road asset management

Queensland Department of Main Roads, Australia, spends approximately A$ 1 billion annually for road infrastructure asset management. To effectively manage road infrastructure, firstly road agencies not only need to optimise the expenditure for data collection, but at the same time, not jeopardise the reliability in using the optimised data to predict maintenance and rehabilitation costs. Secondly, road agencies need to accurately predict the deterioration rates of infrastructures to reflect local conditions so that the budget estimates could be accurately estimated. And finally, the prediction of budgets for maintenance and rehabilitation must provide a certain degree of reliability. This paper presents the results of case studies in using the probability-based method for an integrated approach (i.e. assessing optimal costs of pavement strength data collection; calibrating deterioration prediction models that suit local condition and assessing risk-adjusted budget estimates for road maintenance and rehabilitation for assessing life-cycle budget estimates). The probability concept is opening the path to having the means to predict life-cycle maintenance and rehabilitation budget estimates that have a known probability of success (e.g. produce budget estimates for a project life-cycle cost with 5% probability of exceeding). The paper also presents a conceptual decision-making framework in the form of risk mapping in which the life-cycle budget/cost investment could be considered in conjunction with social, environmental and political issues.

Framework for investment decision-making under risk and uncertainty for infrastructure asset management

A study has been conducted to investigate current practices on decision-making under risk and uncertainty for infrastructure project investments. It was found that many European countries such as the UK, France, Germany including Australia use scenarios for the investigation of the effects of risk and uncertainty of project investments. Different alternative scenarios are mostly considered during the engineering economic cost-benefit analysis stage. For instance, the World Bank requires an analysis of risks in all project appraisals. Risk in economic evaluation needs to be addressed by calculating sensitivity of the rate of return for a number of events. Risks and uncertainties of project developments arise from various sources of errors including data, model and forecasting errors. It was found that the most influential factors affecting risk and uncertainty resulted from forecasting errors. Data errors and model errors have trivial effects. It was argued by many analysts that scenarios do not forecast what will happen but scenarios indicate only what can happen from given alternatives. It was suggested that the probability distributions of end-products of the project appraisal, such as cost-benefit ratios that take forecasting errors into account, are feasible decision tools for economic evaluation. Political, social, environmental as well as economic and other related risk issues have been addressed and included in decision-making frameworks, such as in a multi-criteria decisionmaking framework. But no suggestion has been made on how to incorporate risk into the investment decision-making process.

Comparative study of guidelines and practices for building infrastructure asset management

This paper presents a comparative study of primarily Australian (and limited international) practices and guidelines on Buildings Asset Management (BAM). The objective of this study was to identify potential gaps in current practices and potential areas of research for further improvement. The paper starts with an overview of BAM. Later sections cover current BAM practices and guidelines across different states of Australia; give a limited overview of international practices and concludes with the authors’ observations.

Towards a building sustainability assessment framework

This paper provides an overview of a new framework for a design stage Building Environmental Assessment (BEA) tool and a discussion of strategic responses to existing tool issues and relative stakeholder requirements that lead to the development of this tool founded on new information and communication technology (ICT) related to developments in 3D CAD technology. After introducing the context of the BEA and some of their team’s new work the authors • Critique current BEA tool theory; • Review previous assessments of stakeholder needs; • Introduce a new framework applied to analyse such tools • Highlight and key results considering illustrative ICT capabilities and • Discuss their potential significance upon BEA tool stakeholders.

A national building products inventory

Australia has no nationally accepted building products life cycle inventory (LCI) database for use in building Ecologically Sustainable Development (ESD) assessment (BEA) tools. More information about the sustainability of the supply chain is limited by industry’s lack of real capacity to deliver objective information on process and product environmental impact. Recognition of these deficits emerged during compilation of a National LCI database to inform LCADesign, a prototype 3 dimensional object oriented computer aided design (3-D CAD) commercial building design tool. Development of this Australian LCI represents 24 staff years of effort here since 1995. Further development of LCADesign extensions is proposed as being essential to support key applications demanded from a more holistic theoretical framework calling for modules of new building and construction industry tools. A proposed tool, conceptually called LCADetails, is to serve the building product industries own needs as well as that of commercial building design amongst other industries’ prospective needs. In this paper, a proposition is examined that the existing national LCI database should be further expanded to serve Australian building product industries’ needs as well as to provide details for its client-base from a web based portal containing a module of practical supply and procurement applications. Along with improved supply chain assessment services, this proposed portal is envisaged to facilitate industry environmental life cycle improvement assessment and support decision-making to provide accredited data for operational reporting capabilities, load-based reasoning as well as BEA applications. This paper provides an overview of developments to date, including a novel 3-D CAD information and communications technology (ICT) platform for more holistic integration of existing tools for true cost assessment. Further conceptualisation of future prospects, based on a new holistic life cycle assessment framework LCADevelop, considering stakeholder relationships and their need for a range of complementary tools leveraging automated function off such ICT platforms to inform dimensionally defined operations for such as automotive, civil, transport and industrial applications are also explored.

Identification of key environmental issues for building materials

Manufacture, construction and use of buildings and building materials make a significant environmental impact internally (inside the building), locally (neighbourhood) and globally. Life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology is being applied for evaluating the environmental impact of building/or building materials. One of the major applications of LCA is to identify key issues of a product system from cradle to grave. Key issues identified in an LCA lead one to the right direction in assessing the environmental aspects of a product system and help to identify the areas for improvement of the environmental performance of a product as well. The purpose of this paper is to suggest two methods for identifying key issues using an integrated tool (LCADesign), which has been developed to provide a method of determining the best alternative for reducing environmental impacts from a building or building materials, and compare both methods in the case study. This paper assists the designers or marketers related to building or building materials in their decision making by giving information on activities or alternatives which are identified as key issues for environmental impacts.

LCADesign : an integrated approach to automatic eco-efficiency assessment of commercial buildings

Buildings consume resources and energy, contribute to pollution of our air, water and soil, impact the health and well-being of populations and constitute an important part of the built environment in which we live. The ability to assess their design with a view to reducing that impact automatically from their 3D CAD representations enables building design professionals to make informed decisions on the environmental impact of building structures. Contemporary 3D object-oriented CAD files contain a wealth of building information. LCADesign has been designed as a fully integrated approach for automated eco-efficiency assessment of commercial buildings direct from 3D CAD. LCADesign accesses the 3D CAD detail through Industry Foundation Classes (IFCs) - the international standard file format for defining architectural and constructional CAD graphic data as 3D real-world objects - to permit construction professionals to interrogate these intelligent drawing objects for analysis of the performance of a design. The automated take-off provides quantities of all building components whose specific production processes, logistics and raw material inputs, where necessary, are identified to calculate a complete list of quantities for all products such as concrete, steel, timber, plastic etc and combines this information with the life cycle inventory database, to estimate key internationally recognised environmental indicators such as CML, EPS and Eco-indicator 99. This paper outlines the key modules of LCADesign and their role in delivering an automated eco-efficiency assessment for commercial buildings.

Life cycle inventory for Australian building materials

This paper discusses challenges to developers of a national Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) database on which to base assessment of building environmental impacts and a key to development of a fully integrated eco-design tool created for automated eco-efficiency assessment of commercial building design direct from 3D CAD. The scope of this database includes Australian and overseas processing burdens involved in acquiring, processing, transporting, fabricating, finishing and using metals, masonry, timber, glazing, ceramics, plastics, fittings, composites and coatings. Burdens are classified, calculated and reported for all flows of raw materials, fuels, energy and emissions to and from the air, soil and water associated with typical products and services in building construction, fitout and operation. The aggregated life cycle inventory data provides the capacity to generate environmental impact assessment reports based on accepted performance indicators. Practitioners can identify hot spots showing high environmental burdens of a proposed design and drill down to report on specific building components. They can compare assessments with case studies and operational estimates to assist in eco-efficient design of a building, fitout and operation.

Curriculum mapping of the Spatial Science Program, QUT : what was the cartography journey?

There are currently a number of issues of great importance affecting universities and the way in which their programs are now offered. Many issues are largely being driven top-down and impact both at a university-wide and at an individual discipline level. This paper provides a brief history of cartography and digital mapping education at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT). It also provides an overview of what is curriculum mapping and presents some interesting findings from the program review process. Further, this review process has triggered discussion and action for the review, mapping and embedding of graduate attributes within the spatial science major program. Some form of practical based learning is expected in vocationally oriented degrees that lead to professional accreditation and are generally regarded as a good learning exposure. With the restructure of academic programs across the Faculty of Built Environment and Engineering in 2006, spatial science and surveying students now undertake a formal work integrated learning unit. There is little doubt that students acquire the skills of their discipline (mapping science, spatial) by being immersed in the industry culture- learning how to process information and solve real-world problems within context. The broad theme of where geo-spatial mapping skills are embedded in this broad-based tertiary education course are examined with some focused discussion on the learning objectives, outcomes and examples of some student learning experiences

Innovative cartography standards for Web-GIS portals : case study of the 'Survey of Israel's' Web-GIS Portal

Maps have been published on the world wide web since its inception (Cartwright, 1999) and are still accessed and viewed by millions of users today (Peterson, 2003). While early webbased GIS products lacked a complete set of cartographic capabilities, the functionality within such systems has significantly increased over recent years. Functionalities once found only in desktop GIS products are now available in web-based GIS applications, for example, data entry, basic editing, and analysis. Applications based on web-GIS are becoming more widespread and the web-based GIS environment is replacing the traditional desktop GIS platforms in many organizations. Therefore, development of a new cartographic method for web-based GIS is vital. The broad aim of this project is to examine and discuss the challenges and opportunities of innovative cartography methods for web-based GIS platforms. The work introduces a recently developed cartographic methodology, which is based on a web-based GIS portal by the Survey of Israel (SOI). The work discusses the prospects and constraints of such methods in improving web-GIS interfaces and usability for the end user. The work also tables the preliminary findings of the initial implementation of the web-based GIS cartographic method within the portal of the Survey of Israel, as well as the applicability of those methods elsewhere.

Web-based public participatory GIS

Decision support systems (DSS) have evolved rapidly during the last decade from stand alone or limited networked solutions to online participatory solutions. One of the major enablers of this change is the fastest growing areas of geographical information system (GIS) technology development that relates to the use of the Internet as a means to access, display, and analyze geospatial data remotely. World-wide many federal, state, and particularly local governments are designing to facilitate data sharing using interactive Internet map servers. This new generation DSS or planning support systems (PSS), interactive Internet map server, is the solution for delivering dynamic maps and GIS data and services via the world-wide Web, and providing public participatory GIS (PPGIS) opportunities to a wider community (Carver, 2001; Jankowski & Nyerges, 2001). It provides a highly scalable framework for GIS Web publishing, Web-based public participatory GIS (WPPGIS), which meets the needs of corporate intranets and demands of worldwide Internet access (Craig, 2002). The establishment of WPPGIS provides spatial data access through a support centre or a GIS portal to facilitate efficient access to and sharing of related geospatial data (Yigitcanlar, Baum, & Stimson, 2003). As more and more public and private entities adopt WPPGIS technology, the importance and complexity of facilitating geospatial data sharing is growing rapidly (Carver, 2003). Therefore, this article focuses on the online public participation dimension of the GIS technology. The article provides an overview of recent literature on GIS and WPPGIS, and includes a discussion on the potential use of these technologies in providing a democratic platform for the public in decision-making.

A model for assessing and correcting project Health

Maintaining the health of a construction project can help to achieve the desired outcomes of the project. An analogy is drawn to the medical process of a human health check where it is possible to broadly diagnose health in terms of a number of key areas such as blood pressure or cholesterol level. Similarly it appears possible to diagnose the current health of a construction project in terms of a number of Critical Success Factors (CSFs) and key performance indicators (KPIs). The medical analogy continues into the detailed investigation phase where a number of contributing factors are evaluated to identify possible causes of ill health and through the identification of potential remedies to return the project to the desired level of health. This paper presents the development of a model that diagnoses the immediate health of a construction project, investigates the factors which appear to be causing the ill health and proposes a remedy to return the project to good health. The proposed model uses the well-established continuous improvement management model (Deming, 1986) to adapt the process of human physical health checking to construction project health.

Understanding preservice teachers’ predispositions for teaching engineering education in Australian schools.

Engineering education is underrepresented in Australia at the primary, middle school and high school levels. Understanding preservice teachers’ preparedness to be involved in engineering will be important for developing an engineering curriculum. This study administered a literature-based survey to 36 preservice teachers, which gathered data about their perceptions of engineering and their predispositions for teaching engineering. Findings indicated that the four constructs associated with the survey had acceptable Cronbach alpha scores (i.e., personal professional attributes .88, student motivation .91, pedagogical knowledge .91, and fused curricula .89). However, there was no “disagree” or “strongly disagree” response greater than 22% for any of the 25 survey items. Generally, these preservice teachers indicated predispositions for teaching engineering in the middle school. Extensive scaffolding and support with education programs will assist preservice teachers to develop confidence in this field. Governments and education departments need to recognise the importance of engineering education, and universities must take a stronger role in developing engineering education curricula.

Determinants of listed property trust bond ratings : Australian evidence

Using artificial neural networks (ANN) and ordinal regression (OR) as alternative methods to predict LPT bond ratings, we examine the role that various financial and industry variables have on Listed Property Trust (LPT) bond ratings issued by Standard and Poor’s from 1999-2006. Our study shows that both OR and ANN provide robust alternatives to rating LPT bonds and that there are no significant differences in results between the two full models. OR results show that of the financial variables used in our models, debt coverage and financial leverage ratios have the most profound effect on LPT bond ratings. Further, ANN results show that 73.0% of LPT bond rating is attributable to financial variables and 23.0% to industry-based variables with office LPT sector accounting for 2.6%, retail LPT 10.9% and stapled management structure 13.5%.