EAPPM 1994
Preface
We are on the way from an industrial society to an information society. This is in fact a revolution, very much like the industrial revolution at the end of the last century. Nowadays, information is becoming so valuable as labour, time and money are. The advances in information technology bring enormous advantages to the productivity in almost every branch of industry and have a considerable impact on the social and economic life as a whole. However, despite the great progress of information technology in the last years, disappointments often arise because too high have been the expectations, or too short the time schedules, or too short-sighted the predefined goals and scope. It has become clear that isolated solutions for single tasks cannot be satisfying over a longer time. Substantial benefits from the use of information technology in industry can be achieved only by synchronised efforts across disciplines and domains. There is a strong need of truly interdiscipline team work on a large scale which is a challenge not only to researchers and developers, but also to software vendors, distributors, end-users, managers and even politicians. The whole society has to be on the move.
In the building industry, the main vehicle of this development are the advances in product and process modelling. On the basis of a product and process modelling kernel other areas, such as multi-media, can be attached and existing applications can be extended and integrated. Information processing increases enormously its value in the context of an integrated model of a product and its environment, and a model of the process, i.e. the activities involved in the product's development and maintenance through its whole life cycle.
Information technology for the building industry means more than computer applications for numerical problems, such as structural, heat or fluid analysis or cost calculation and construction scheduling. It means also more than CAD, or CADD, or CAAD. In fact, it involves the integration of all product development processes and the management of the information flow between them, irrespective of the data models chosen in the different implementations of one and the same process. Therefore, what is needed are concepts for distributed data models which describe a building product through its whole life cycle - from the early feasibility studies till its demolition or its preservation as a specimen of our architectural and engineering heritage. In order to achieve such high objectives, methods from the field of artificial intelligence have to be applied. Expert system, knowledge-based system and decision support system techniques have to be used for the development of intelligent tools for the integration of all processes and for management of the information flow and the conversion of the information between the different models depicting the real, inhomogeneous world.
The basic questions is: what are we dealing with - information - knowledge - intelligence?
We are building systems to carry knowledge and information. Depending on its complexity and originality, information becomes knowledge. And, depending on the complexity, the originality and the possibility of self-recognition of its current state, a system becomes an intelligent system. Thus, a building becomes an "intelligent building" if it is equipped with monitoring and reacting systems, e.g. for the active control of earthquake induced shaking.
As a first attempt to bring together the distributed efforts in Europe in this advanced field of our engineering science, the First European Conference on Product and Product Modelling in the Building Industry (ECPPM'94) held in October 1994 in Dresden has hopefully succeeded in making a useful and promising contribution in the broad move of the building industry on its way from the industrial to the information age. The conference brought to light a lot of excellent works and encouraged all participants to continue and deepen their research efforts - all important catalysts of the enormous changes that take place in the building industry in the course of this revolutionary process. Though particularly intended to advance closer co-operation within Europe, ECPPM'94 enjoyed world-wide attention. We appreciate the interest shown in the conference by our colleagues outside Europe and the exchange of information with them.
The conference was initiated by the EU Building IT Projects Interest Group, which was founded by responsible participants from the 5 EU projects ATLAS, CIMSTEEL, COMBI, COMBINE and ROCCO, supported by the European Commission. The results presented by them, and by several other European Commission or national government supported projects in the AEC domain, such as BRICC, GSD, MARITIME, NICK, OPTIMA, RATAS and RETEX, gave a stimulus to the whole conference work and helped bridge the gap between academic research and industry. Most of these projects demonstrated useful contributions to the international standardisation effort STEP, as well as a variety of promising implications to future industrial development. Since dissemination of results is a very important part of governmentally supported research and development, we believe that a periodic biannual conference can become an excellent dissemination tool for it can easily address the right persons and can act as a magnet of the integration efforts in the building IT area all over Europe. We hope that ECPPM'94 has put the base stone for such a forum.
These proceedings contain 80 papers contributed from authors from 20 countries, which are grouped in the following 4 sections:
1. Product modelling,
2. Design process modelling,
3. Automation in construction and facility management,
4. Integration environments: European projects.
Extended abstracts of all papers have been reviewed by two referees from a large international panel. Thanks go to them for their efforts, to our sponsor, the German Research Foundation (DFG) and to A.A.Balkema Publishers for their co-operation in producing these proceedings. Finally, special thanks are due to my co-workers Peter Katranuschkov, Markus Hauser, Stefan Abele, Christian Steurer, Martin Zsohar and Christoph Nollau for their devoted assistance in organising and carrying out the conference and giving shape to this volume.
Raimar J. Scherer
Dresden
December 1994
Organisation committee
Scherer, R.J. Chairman, Dresden University of Technology(TUD)
Zumpe, G. TUD
Katranuschkov, P. University Karlsruhe
Hauser, M. TUD
Menzel, K. TUD
Abele, S. TUD
International scientific committee
Augenbroe, G. Delft University, the Netherlands
Björk, B.-C. Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
Bock, T. University Karlsruhe, Germany
Duhovnik, J. University Ljubljana, Slovenia
Fenves, G. University of California at Berkley, USA
Fruchter, R. Stanford University, USA
Garrett, J.H. Jr. CMU, Pittsburgh, USA
Gielingh, W. TNO, Delft, the Netherlands
Haas, W. RIB, Stuttgart, Germany
Hartmann, D. Ruhr University, Bochum, Germany
Junge, R. CAB, Munich, Germany
Karstila, K. VTT, Finland
Kohler, N. University Karlsruhe, Germany
Myklebust, O. Sintef, Oslo, Norway
Poyet, P. CSTB, Sophia Antipolis, France
Protopsaltis, B. SOFiSTiK, Athens, Greece
Salvaneschi, P. ISMES, Pavia, Italy
Schmitt, G. ETH, Zürich, Switzerland
Smith, I.F.C. EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland
Sriram, D. MIT, Cambridge, USA
Tzanev, D. University of Architecture & Civil Eng., Sofia, Bulgaria
Watson, A. University Leeds, UK
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source: "http://cib.bau.tu-dresden.de" |
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