ABSTRACT
It is certainly no surprise that construction and operations of buildings and infrastructure systems require a huge amount of information from specifications, plans, construction documents, inventory management, cost estimating, and scheduling, for the design and construction phase and maintenance records, inspections and sensor data for the operations phase. As the AEC industry adopts new computer technologies like laser scanners, sensor networks, RFIDs, digital cameras, among many other data acquisition technologies computerized construction/operations data are becoming more and more available. There exist numerous opportunities to exploit this vast amount of data. Unlike much previous data management research that has been successfully applied in several domains, in the AEC domain, however, the data are of multiple types and from many different sources, some with very low quality.
At the same time that we have increasing access to data, infrastructure systems, broadly defined to include buildings and other facilities, transportation infrastructure, telecommunication networks, the power grid and natural environmental systems will require more and more that engineers provide a continuous state awareness, assessment and proactive decision making for the complete life-cycle of the systems and processes they create. Such continuous state awareness and proactive decision making will allow these systems to be more efficiently and effectively managed in both normal and abnormal conditions.
There are many technological developments and research projects that already support, or begin to support this vision. At this talk professor Soibelman will introduce his vision and work developed within his research group focus on the application and exploration of emerging Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), to a broadly defined set of infrastructure systems and associated processes, such as planning, design, construction, facility/infrastructure management, and environmental monitoring, so as to improve their sustainability, efficiency, maintainability, durability, and overall performance of these systems.
