This paper describes an improved model for multiple building diffraction modeling based on the uniform theory of diffraction (UTD). A well-known problem in conventional uniform theory of diffraction (CUTD) is multiple-edge transition zone diffraction. Here, higher order diffracted fields are used in order to improve the result; hence, we use higher order diffraction coefficients to improve a hy...

One of the most challenging issues in modern-day building energy management involves equipping the buildings with more energy efficient facilities. In this paper, a hybrid system for cooling/heating for a residential building is developed and optimized. The system consists of a ground source heat pump (GSHP) as well as an electric chiller (EC) and boiler. The model is implemented in MATLAB ...

Nowadays, as a result of increased terrorist and bomb attacks throughout the globe in the vicinity of strategic buildings, designing these structures against impact loads, particularly the blast-related ones, has been taken into more consideration. The current procedure for designing the structure against an explosion is a design against the local failure of the current elements in the first st...

In the fast developing Mainland China, among the huge number of new construction project, green building constitute only a very small portion. This paper tries to figure out the factors that restrain the development of green building in Mainland China by carrying out surveys among construction professionals and university researchers. Fifteen barriers that may affect the development of green bu...

An important aspect of intelligence is the ability to switch perspectives. In the course of reasoning about a particular subject matter, it can be convenient to change from one perspective of the subject matter to another perspective, which is often at a different level of abstraction. For example, in some situations it may be advantageous to view a building as a collection of floors and in oth...

The Multi-Level Alignment System (MuLAS) is the L2F tool for building multi-tier speech corpora with reduced or no human intervention at all. MuLAS automatically combines information coming from external speech annotations, human or machine-generated, with the text-based utterance descriptions that it creates, in order to build more reliable and complete descriptions of the spoken utterances. T...