The object of this paper is the evaluation of the seismic response of reinforced concrete frames designed according to the DDBD (direct displacement-based design) approach. The great part of research works about DDBD has been dedicated to planar frames, but recently also some proposals for 3D structures have been presented, in particular for wall structures. This paper will give a further contr...

The current trend towards globalization forces the AEC community to change its practical approach from a non-systematic, labor-intensive to a systematic one. Based on the paradigm shifted from ‘drawing’ to ‘constructing’ in architectural design practice, this paper focuses on developing a new type of CAD system that automatically constructs and manages well-structured floor plans with minimum g...

Bangladesh is one of the most earthquake prone areas in South-Asia and Sylhet is the most seismic vulnerable region in Bangladesh. Seismic performance analysis is highly recommended to ensure safe and sound building structures for this region. To get better performance from reinforced concrete (RCC) structure, new seismic design provisions require structural engineers to perform both static and...

Planning a new health sciences library at the beginning of the twenty-first century is a tremendous challenge. Technology has radically changed the way libraries function in an academic environment and the services they provide. Some individuals question whether the library as place will continue to exist as information becomes increasingly available electronically. To understand how libraries ...

This paper proposes a critical analysis of the intervention, over time, in housing estates built under Improvement Plan for city Porto. plan enabled construction significant number dwellings within limited period promoting broad and impactful urban social restructuring mid-twentieth century. Several post-construction interventions last decades were important opportunities to improve quality lif...

Abstract A prototype tool to assist architects during the early design stage of floor plans has been developed, consisting of an Evolutionary Program for the Space Allocation Problem (EPSAP), which generates sets of floor plan alternatives according to the architect's preferences; and a Floor Plan Performance Optimization Program (FPOP), which optimizes the selected solutions according to therm...

This paper presents a preliminary study on occupant behavior modeling for estimating high-resolution electricity demand profile of residential buildings. First, the existing occupant behavior models are considered. We then introduce an occupant behavior model developed on the basis of the approach employed in an existing model and an energy demand model that uses the output of the occupant beha...

1. Introduction The work consists in designing and building up a model of noise propagation caused by vehicular traffic in urban environment. Obviously the problem has already been deeply described in literature: the new approach we have studied and developed tries to give a simple model suitable to estimate the noise values and to simulate different scenarios due to a change in the traffic pla...

Although location based applications have been gaining popularity, most positioning devices do not work when in an indoor environment, hindering the development of indoor location based applications. In this paper we propose a technique, based on the detection of footsteps, and the direction in which they were taken by the user, to be able to calculate the position of the user inside a building...

This paper introduces a practical approach to constructing a hybrid 3D metrical–topological model of a university campus or other extended urban region from labeled 2D floor plan geometry. An exhaustive classification of adjacency types is provided for a typical infrastructure, including roads, walkways, green-space, and detailed indoor spaces. We extend traditional lineal techniques to 2D open...