The environmental movement has emerged as a response to society’s concerns about the sustainability of Earth’s natural resources and the effects of human activity on the environment and on society’s wellbeing. Effects such as deforestation, air and water pollution, and resource depletion have shown to cause a decline in the quality of life of humans. In response, concerned citizens, non-governm...

Compared to other large industries, the building industry is highly fragmented, with most projects undertaken by temporary, project-based organizations consisting of many small firms. The client may consist of a variety of stakeholders within a company, perhaps including a building committee, groups of end-users and facilities management personnel. The design team may be led by an architect, bu...

Numerical simulation is a powerful design and audit tool. But in the building industry, it is not as widely spread as in other industries (electronics, car industry, space industry...). Meanwhile, in building related research centers, various simulation codes have been developed. These codes are generally powerful on the numerical level and can cope with a large range of building related issues...

Regulatory compliance check in the building industry is a complex task that involves cross-domain national and international standards and regulations. This paper introduces a refined approach to extract SWRL rules from building accessibility regulatory texts and then to transform them into executable rules for semi-automatic compliance checking of Building Information Models. The domain ontolo...

Building with Nature is a new approach to designing water infrastructure, one that seeks to realize socioeconomic project goals in harmony with the environment. The Dutch dredging industry is promoting its application in the Netherlands, but similar concepts are emerging internationally. The Working with Nature concept has been developed under the auspices of the World Association for Waterborn...

The New Zealand building design industry assumes various building model inputs for the consumption of energy through lighting and appliances. It also makes assumptions regarding when these energy consumers are considered to be “turned on”. This paper aims to better inform industry energy modellers about the real load and operation of real commercial buildings in New Zealand when compared to New...

Building Information Modeling is a prevailing methodology in the building industry and half (by length) of the world's shield tunnels are in Japan. Accordingly, for shield tunnels from 2005 to 2007, we developed a product model called IFC-ShieldTunnel, which is based on Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), in order to meet the future demand for such a product model. IFC-ShieldTunnel was developed...