More BIM–Revit Seminars from AutoDesk

Here’s a flier and sign-up for a series that may be of interest for those of you who want to investigate BIM more intensively.  It’s obviously focused on Revit.

Virtual Design and Construction with BIM Is Becoming Industry Standard

As construction picks up around the country, BIM use is increasing for many reasons, from winning new business to making budgets go further.

Construction firms are using BIM to:

•Pursue new business

•Experience better project outcomes

•Maintain repeat business

•Reduce rework

Sign up for the BIM information series, which provides access to short videos, reports, interviews and more. You'll quickly see why BIM use is up and how you can use BIM to:

•Extend the design intent models for constructability

•Efficiently plan and schedule

•Uncover and fix conflicts before breaking ground

As an example of what you'll get in this series, watch the screencast "Prepping Your BIM Model for Construction Scheduling and Logistics." Anthony Governanti from Autodesk explains how to set up and modify your BIM model for construction, as well as how to get the most value from your data.

The volume of construction projects is increasing, and more and more owners are making BIM a requirement to bid on their projects. Don't miss this opportunity to learn how BIM can increase the competitiveness of your firm.

Note:  I copied the sign-up link from an email.  It may think that you are James.Mitchell if you use it.  If so, I apologize.

Rapid Construction–30 Story Hotel in 15 Days

I’m not sure exactly how this building relates to “Intelligence”, although I suspect there may have been some robotics in the factory.  Nonetheless its indicative of some of the changes and possibilities that are coming – and it’s amazing.

Final Database Assignment - Variety

Question:

The grading criteria for the final database assignment says we must address at least two building systems with comments on similarities and differences between them. My database is currently of all the green buildings in Philadelphia, with keys to the manufacturers and architects. I am a bit confused on what this requirement is asking for and how to incorporate it into my database, could you please clarify?

Response

Anyone in a similar situation should interpret this requirement as requiring variety in the entries in their database.  In this case that might mean both institutional, commercial, industrial building types.

FYI – the grading criteria stem from when I required sensor types.  I hadn’t thought through this issue.

Skip Week-8 Blog

Last Tuesday we were going to start a topic that was to become the subject for the Week-8 blogs.  Because the lecture ran long we didn’t have time to start that discussion.  For that reason:

No Blog due Week-8.  Use the time to advance your Term Project.

Note that there is no blog in week-9 either, BUT there IS a blog due in Week-10.

Sensors Blog–Grading Comments

This week was a particularly successful one.  You covered a wide range of sensors and addressed the physical principles behind most of them quite well. What follows are some specific comments:

• A few of you recognized explicitly that what is actually measured in most cases is NOT the variable of interest, instead it typically an effect of that variable that lends itself to measurement – typically electrical, but not always.
• One aspect that almost no one addressed was the response time of the various sensors.  Some of them (e.g. many humidity sensors) can take many seconds or even minutes to generate a reading, whereas other can have response times of milliseconds or even less.
• Accuracy and repeatability were important aspects that appeared in a few of your posts, as was the longevity.  Associated with longevity is the idea of sensor “drift” over time, requiring recalibration of instruments that must be precise.

Term Project Drafts–Comments

I’ve just completed reading the drafts of the term projects/papers that you submitted.  There was a great range of length from two who turned in nothing to a lengthy document with full citations in many areas.  Some were still outlines in format and others were nearly finished documents.  As such there is nothing to say that applies to everyone.  Here are some comments that apply to at least several of the projects.

Numbers

Engineers love numbers because they quantify and make it easy to compare things as well as judge capacity, cost, consistency, strength etc.  Far too many of you left your numbers on the computer and not in what you wrote.  An engineering topic deserves engineering support.

Citations

If you make an assertion that something is true that isn’t common sense or textbook material in a required course then you’re expected to cite the source so the reader can check it for themselves and make their own judgment of its validity.  Too many of you ignored this requirement.

Overly Long Introductions

A number of you wrote long introductions that were out of proportion to the main topic of the paper, several times causing truncation of the most important part.  Watch for balance in the paper.  I’d argue the introduction should be no more than 10-20% of the total.

Cohesiveness

Several of the papers were clearly composed by group members who hadn’t agreed on an effective division of labor.  The papers read as though they were by different authors on different topics.  The paper should read like the work of one person pursing a logic progression through their material.

A Seminar that Might Interest You–Friday 2/22/13–University Crossings-153

The technical details of this may be over the heads of many of us (myself included), but the topic is clearly relevant to the general focus of this course.

---

Dr. Rahul Mangharam “Closing the loop with Cyber-Physical System Modeling”

Cyber-Physical Systems are the next generation of embedded systems with the tight integration of computing, communication and control of "messy" plants. I will describe our recent efforts in modeling for scheduling and control of closed-loop Cyber-Physical Systems across the domains of medical devices, energy-efficient buildings and programmable automotive systems. The design of bug-free and safe medical device software is challenging, especially in complex implantable devices that control and actuate organs whose response is not fully understood. Safety recalls of pacemakers and implantable cardioverter defibrillators between 1990 and 2000 affected over 600,000 devices. Of these, 200,000 or 41%, were due to firmware issues (i.e. software) that continue to increase in frequency. There is currently no formal methodology or open experimental platform to test and verify the correct operation of medical device software within the closed-loop context of the patient. I will describe our efforts to develop the foundations of modeling, synthesis and development of verified medical device software and systems from verified closed-loop models of the pacemaker and the heart. With the goal to develop a tool-chain for certifiable software for medical devices, I will walk through (a) formal modeling of the heart and pacemaker in timed automata, (b) verification of the closed-loop system, (c) automatic model translation from UPPAAL to Stateflow for simulation-based testing, and (d) automatic code generation for platform-level testing of the heart and real pacemakers. More details here. As time permits, I will describe our investigations in energy-efficient building automation in which we coordinate scheduling of controllers for peak power minimization across multiple plants. We will also briefly discuss in-vehicle and networked vehicle-to- vehicle programmable automotive architectures for the future.

Speaker Bio:

Rahul Mangharam is the Stephen J Angello Chair and Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Electrical & Systems Engineering and Dept. of Computer & Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He directs the Real-Time and Embedded Systems Lab at Penn. His interests are in real-time scheduling algorithms for networked embedded systems with applications in automotive systems, medical devices and industrial control networks. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University where he also received his MS and BS in 2007, 2002 and 2000 respectively. In 2002, he was a member of technical staff in the Ultra-Wide Band Wireless Group at Intel Labs. He was an international scholar in the Wireless Systems Group at IMEC, Belgium in 2003. He has worked on ASIC chip design at Marconi Communications (1999) and Gigabit Ethernet at Apple Computer Inc. (2000). Rahul received the 2012 Intel Early Faculty Career Award and was selected by the National Academy of Engineering for the 2012 US Frontiers of Engineering.

Travis Peyton–Week-8 Guest Speaker

Our speaker next week has much experience “in the trenches” dealing with networked sensors in the service of increasing building efficiency.  Here’s his bio from LinkedIn.

As the Owner of a consulting MEP/FP engineering firm and also an Energy Efficiency focused firm I spend my time solving design problems as well as operational problems. The dirty truth of buildings is that they are far more complex to build and manage than most people realize. My 20 years of experience allows me to help people untangle the complexity. My objective is to figure out a way to simplify how people build and run building energy systems.
Specialties:

• HVAC Engineering
• Energy Efficiency
• LEED Certifications
• Energy Star Certifications
• Computational Fluid Dynamics

Drexel Degrees

• BSAE
• BSCE (structural)
• MSCE (special topic - CFD)
• MSEngmt

www.hpegroup.com

Week-7 Class Structure

• Part-1 – Talk by Dr. Song on Relational Databases

• Part-2 – Databases – Some More Practical Material

Another View on the Social Implications of Technology

Here’s the beginning of an article from Tech Crunch arguing that we are going to see employment implications of technology.

Get Ready To Lose Your Job

Jon Evans

Saturday, February 16th, 2013

163 Comments

“Technological revolutions happen in two main phases: the installation phase and the deployment phase,” observes Angel of the Year and new Andreessen Horowitz GP Chris Dixon, who says that the turning point between those phases for the Age of Information is…now.

Meanwhile, “profits have surged as a share of national income, while wages and other labor compensation are down,” notes Paul Krugman. Walter Russell Mead agrees: “The old industrial middle class…has been hollowed out, and no comparable source of stable high income employment has emerged.” Recent data supports that: “Incomes rose more than 11 percent for the top 1 percent of (American) earners during the economic recovery, but barely at all for everybody else … Median household income is about 9 percent lower than it was in 1999.”

Coincidence? Nope. The great tech revolution of the last 30 years is finally beginning to metastasize into every other human domain–in other words, software is eating the world, endangering almost every job there is. I argued a few weeks ago that this means America has now hit peak jobs. Let me now unpack that a bit.

The Advance of AI & Neural Networks

Here’s an article from Wired today

How Google Retooled Android With Help From Your Brain

By Robert McMillan

02.18.13

6:30 AM

A picture of the human voice, courtesy the AndroSpectro app. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

When Google built the latest version of its Android mobile operating system, the web giant made some big changes to the way the OS interprets your voice commands. It installed a voice recognition system based on what’s called a neural network — a computerized learning system that behaves much like the human brain.

For many users, says Vincent Vanhoucke, a Google research scientist who helped steer the effort, the results were dramatic. “It kind of came as a surprise that we could do so much better by just changing the model,” he says.

Downloading Revit Families

Question

Do you know where can i get high quality free Revit MEP family? Please give me some suggestion. Thanks for your time.

Response

• Autodesk provides its “Seek” site to download families.
• You can find many others with this Google Search.

Once you’ve downloaded the file you need to “load” them into your project. To do that one way is:

• Choose “Component” in the Architecture menu (it’s the icon in the upper right in the image below

Then choose “load” in the “Type Properties” dialog box that opens”

Week-6 Blog Posts–Grading Comments

The level of posts this week was high, making them generally a pleasure to read.  Thanks.  Here are some specific comments.

• Object Oriented Databases (OODBS) was the toughest category this week.  Wkipedia has a pretty good description of them.  What makes them unique and important is probably best understood in the section of that article headed ODBMS Characteristics and also in the section Comparison with RDBMSs
• Several of you came ups with interesting applications of DBs including one for integrating Geotech data from multiple firms (this should sound quite similar to COBie)
• Several of you forgot to turn in the URL to BbLearn.  I found them and gave only a 5-point deduction, but make no promises to do so in future.
• Many of you only cited one other student’s work.  I was lenient this week because of the generally high quality, but will not be so lenient in future.

CAT-061–Meeting Place on Tuesday 2/19 for Dr. Song’s Talk

As I announced in class, we’ll be meeting this week in a regular lecture hall, CAT-061, for our guest lecture by Dr. Il-Yeol Song.

Here’s a brief excerpt from Dr. Song’s biography.

Il-Yeol Song is a professor in the College of Information Science and Technology at Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA. He is also an affiliated professor of Computer Science Division of KAIST, Korea . He has been on the faculty since 1988, achieving Full Professor rank in 2000. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Louisiana State University in 1984 and 1988, respectively. His research focuses on the practical application of modeling & design theory to real-world problems.

His current research areas include conceptual modeling, design & performance optimization of data warehouses, OLAP, CRM, object-oriented analysis & design with UML, modeling & integration of medical & bioinformatic database, and digital forensics. He has won four teaching awards from Drexel University: Exemplary Teaching Awardin 1992, Senior Faculty Teaching Excellence Award in 2000, the 2001 Christian R. and Mary Lindback Distinguished Teaching Award in 2001, and Outstanding Instructor Award in 2011.

Database Assignment–Document Requirement

Question:

“I was confused by the grading rubric.

For the first week it says to submit a document along with the database but on the assignment page it just says to turn in a document for week 8.

Do you want a document for both weeks or just week 8?”

 

Response:

Thanks for catching the error.  Only one document with the Week-8 assignment is required.

Databases–Starting–Class Exercises

Here are the links we’ll use in class tonight.

• Presentation – Outline of exercises
• Spreadsheet – In-Class work on exercises

Blog as Term Project Documentation

Question:

“I was wondering for the writing component of my term project if I could create a blog which outlines different stages of my BIM project development. I think this would be the best way for me to show the different stages of project development.”

 

Response:

Yes. You may do so. It should be interesting.

The last entry should be summative, looking over the whole experience and citing any relevant sources all in one place.

B4–Blog Posts on Term Projects

I was very impressed with the quality overall of this week’s blog posts.  In many cases I learned more about your term projects from the posts than I did from reading the outlines.

Intelligent Building Definition

A number of you commented on the confusing array of definitions of an “Intelligent Building” in the literature and industry more generally.  While I have no problem with your disputing what follows I suggest that you consider how I defined it during the first week of class.

¨Intelligence requires the use of adaptive computer technology.

¨“Intelligence” may exist in any system or phase of the building process.

¨We may thus talk of

• Intelligent Building Industry
• Intelligent Building Design
• Intelligent Building Construction (including renovation)
• Intelligent Building Operation
• We may also subdivide by systems – structure, HVAC etc.”

 

Sensors

A number of you are working with sensors in one manner or another. 

• I suggest, as I did in class, that it’s important to distinguish between the sensors and the software/hardware that makes use of the sensor data. 
• It is particularly useful to understand what the sensor is actually measuring (e.g. change in resistance for a strain gauge) to understand its properties and limitations.

 

Sources

Even when describing your term projects there are almost certainly outside sources that you have (or will) investigated that are relevant to your project.  It’s important to identify them.

A1 Grading–Revit–Comments

Here are my comments on the Revit assignment, A1.

• Overall people did a good job. 
• Some were cautious and only undertook the “novice” assignment even though they’ve worked on the same assignment before.  I’d say they didn’t get the full benefit of the effort.
• A number were quite short and sloppy in the writing - a

 

Difference between Revit and AutoCad

I commented to several students undertaking the “novice” version of the assignment:

I'm not sure that you fully understand the difference between Autocad. a drafting program that fundamentally just makes lines, and Revit, a program that truly models the building as an object that has properties that one can work with (e.g. engineering analysis, schedules, etc).

OR

It's not clear to me that you comprehend how fundamentally different the two programs are.  Revit creates a model that can stand in for the real building in simulations.  Autocad is just a creator of drawings, with no "knowledge" of the object it's creating.

Creating the Bookcase Family

• Many of you appropriately noted the differences in the tutorial instructions from today’s reality.  Authodesk should have done better.
• Understanding the importance of the reference planes (they’re normally used for defining dimension parameters) was a key learning issue for most of you.

P2 - Project Outlines–Grading Comments

I was glad to see that most of you have put serious thought into your projects.  What follows are some comments that I made to individuals that may be relevant to many of you.

Research and Citations

Almost all of your projects are ones that others have attempted/addressed in some manner.  Be sure to perform a reasonable literature search so that you can cite their experience and then compare it to your own.  I suggest that you use, as a minimum:

• Google Search – the obvious starting point for most people
• Google Scholar – it searches the scholarly literature, including patents

 

BIM Projects for Senior Design

Several of you are undertaking projects that enhance your senior design project.  It’s extremely important to be clear how what you’re doing goes beyond what you would have done for Senior Design normally.  By doing so you will be able to compare the results of using these techniques to what you would have achieved without them.

I’d note that these days AE students are using Revit by default in Senior Design.  It’s no longer sufficient to compare a Revit model to what you would have produced with a 2D Autocad or similar program.

 

INTELLIGENT vs. GREEN

Comparing Intelligent Buildings to Green buildings is worthwhile.  It’s important, though, to be sure that you fully explain what you mean by “intelligent” and how it’s used.  One of the best, but not required, ways is to focus on a particular building example and perform the necessary calculations/simulations in order to have meaningful results.

 

BEWARE VAGUE GENERALITIES

As I said in class, I’m looking for projects that use the engineering tools that you’ve learned in your university education.  If the document could equally well have been written by a high school senior after reading a Wikipedia article it won’t do well.  This means thinking critically about the components, operating criteria, realistic costs, boundary conditions, energy requirements etc.

Often a good way to ensure you’ve worked at the necessary level is to apply your general thesis to a particular example, performing necessary calculations and simulations to draw conclusions.

Use of Sensors and Computer Models –A Bridge Application

Matthew Yarnold of our department is defending his PhD thesis this morning (2/6/2013) at 10:00 in Hill Conference room,  There’s reason to believe that the techniques described here might be extended to buildings, though undoubtedly in a more complex manner because the structure isn’t exposed to the elements as is the case for bridges.

TEMPERATURE-BASED STRUCTURAL IDENTIFICATION AND HEALTH MONITORING FOR LONG-SPAN BRIDGES

Temperature-based methods for the structural evaluation and monitoring of long-span bridges were investigated. The motivation for the work stemmed from the critical need for further assessment and preservation techniques for long-span bridges, which represent the most critical (and in many cases irreplaceable) nodes within the transportation network. Through this work, several methods were developed which utilize temperature as the forcing function to experimentally characterize the structure. This approach is novel and represents a potential improvement over current methods (e.g. ambient vibration monitoring) which do not allow the full transfer function of the bridge to be obtained.

In particular, this research developed and investigated three temperature-based evaluation methods. The first, termed Temperature-Based Structural Identification (TBSI), follows from the traditional structural identification framework. This approach is used for direct correlation of the input (temperature) and output responses (strains and displacements) for finite element (FE) model calibration and parameter identification. The second method, termed Temperature-Based Structural Health Monitoring (TBSHM), utilizes a streamlined approach to continually track and identify variations in key temperature-based response patterns. An interpretation framework using changes in these patterns to guide proactive maintenance and preservation practices was also developed. The last method, termed Periodic Temperature-Based Assessment (PTBA), aims to directly (i.e. without the use of an FE model or baseline information) characterize the performance of key mechanisms of a bridge by measuring physically meaningful and easily interpreted response metrics.

The research concluded temperature-based experimentation provides valuable insight into the performance of long-span bridges. TBSI exhibits accurate and reliable identification of FE model boundary and continuity conditions with clear advantages over ambient vibration model updating. The use of TBSHM has also indicated encouraging contributions to conventional SHM approaches. A distinct baseline was identified as the relationship between local strains, global displacements, and temperature variation which produces unique planes in 3D space. These 3D planes have greater sensitivity to parameter modification when compared to ambient vibration methods and show promise for identification of outliers. Additionally, quantitative performance measures were developed for PTBA of long-span bridges. This approach can improve current evaluate methods of movement mechanisms and assess long-term durability of a structure. Overall, TBSI, TBSHM, and PTBA have shown substantial benefits for advancing our understanding of constructed long-span bridge behavior.

Greener via Sensors, Networking and Algorithms

“Novel Designs Are Taking Wind Power to the Next Level

“New technology, including better control algorithms and communications, is improving the performance of wind turbines.

“Superficially, wind turbines haven’t changed much for decades. But they’ve gotten much smarter, and considerably bigger, and that’s helped increase the amount of electricity they can generate and lower the cost of wind power.

“GE’s new 2.5-120 wind turbine, announced last week, is a case in point. Its maximum power output, 2.5 megawatts, is lower than that of the 2.85 megawatt turbine it’s superseding. But over the course of a year it can generate 15 percent more kilowatt hours. Arrays of sensors paired with better algorithms for operating and monitoring the turbine let it keep spinning when earlier generations of wind turbines would have had to shut down.”

This article form MIT”s – Technology review gives an overview.

Week-5 Class Outline

We’ll use this outline for the class tonight.

• Part-1 – Projects
• Part-2 – Data Representation and IFC
• Part-3 – BIM Wrapus