A Grid-Based Research Environment for Civil Engineering

The flow of information brings a tremendous change in the civil engineering industry as well as the politics, economy and culture of a society. The civil engineering field with the information revolution sees the combination of digital technology and construction technology, such as development of integrated construction systems, electronic databases, document management systems, and simulations. As a result, the scale of constructed structures gets larger, multi-functional and complex. These core technologies and the development of extreme technology become an essential part of a nation’s competitive construction strategy. However, related huge experiment facilities are too expensive for an organization, which makes the building and application of them difficult. In this paper, we propose a grid-based research collaboratory that connects fragmented construction experiment facilities and shares their technologies and information across the research community, which ensures the efficiency of the facilities. And based on this research, we propose a design for a real-time hybrid experiment collaboratory in Korea Construction Engineering Development (KOCED) civil engineering research project and describe our experiment with its prototype. Key–Words: Grid system, Remote experiment, Collaborative computing, Civil engineering