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Advanced design strategies supported by iterative engineering performance calculations expand the number of alternatives designers can analyze by orders of magnitude. Yet, in the face of vast, under‐constrained design challenges with wide ranging and sometimes ill‐defined implications related to sustainability, it is not possible to replace building design with automated search. The purpose of this paper is to assist designers in their selection of strategies that have been shown to be effective in promoting sustainability.

This paper applies and extends the design exploration assessment methodology (DEAM) to compare the value of distinct design strategies. The authors use DEAM to demonstrate that designers face non‐trivially distinct challenges, even in the well‐defined arena of design for energy efficiency. They next evaluate and compare the effectiveness of strategies such as point‐analysis, screening, trend analysis, and optimization. They identify associated process costs, and extend DEAM to assess the relative value of information that each strategy provides for a given challenge.

Findings empirically rank six strategies for two challenges and demonstrate the relatively high value of trend analysis for energy‐efficient design.

The implication of the findings is that advanced computer analysis strategies should be pursued to support high performance, energy‐efficient design. Such conclusions motivate future research to assess the value of various strategies in the context of the broad and qualitative fields of sustainable design and development.

At a meeting of the Council of the Royal Borough of Kensington on June 5th Councillor A. J. RICE‐OXLEY, M.D., Chairman of the Public Health Committee, brought up a report as follows:—

The Report of the Royal College of Physicians (London) and the British Cardiac Society issued in April last was the product of a joint working party, whose aim was to formulate the best possible advice which can at present be given to medical practitioners towards the prevention of coronary heart disease. It caused quite a stir, particularly its dietary recommendations, and the mass media made the most of it, more from inferences drawn from the measures recommended than from the report itself. Now that the sensation of it has gone and the dust has begun to settle, we can see the Report contains nothing that is new; it tells us what we have long known. Like the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, except that there are three of them, at least for the moment, the causative factors of the rising incidence of coronary heart disease, built into our affluent society, have been working their way at the heart of man for a good many years now.

This paper aims to develop a framework to represent semantic web query results as Industry Foundation Class (IFC) building models. The subject of interoperability has received considerable attention in the construction literature in recent years. Given the distributed, semantically heterogeneous data sources, the problem is to retrieve information accurately and with minimal human intervention by considering their semantic descriptions.

This paper provides a framework to translate semantic web query results into the XML representations of IFC schema and data. Using the concepts and relationships in an IFC schema, the authors first develop an ontology to specify an equivalent IFC entity in the query results. Then, a mapping structure is defined and used to translate and fill all query results into an ifcXML document. For query processing, the proposed framework implements a set of predefined query mappings between the source schema and a corresponding IFC output schema. The resulting ifcXML document is validated with an XML schema validating parser and then loaded into a building information modeling (BIM) authoring tool.

The research findings indicate that semantic web technology can be used, accurately and with minimal human intervention, to maintain semantic-level information when transforming information between web-based and BIM formats. The developed framework for representing IFC-compatible outputs allows BIM users to query and access building data at any time over the web from data providers.

Currently, the results of semantic web queries are not supported by BIM authoring tools. Thus, the proposed framework utilizes the capabilities of semantic web and query technologies to transform the query results to an XML representation of IFC data.

A recent Fortune article went for the jugular, “Management consultants and business planners share a dirty little secret. Ninety percent of all strategies fail to get implemented.” The same article told the tale of a consultant who took a $3 billion company with no strategy and developed 200 separate Strategic Business Units. The issue is obvious. Given a company that couldn't execute one strategy, how do you suddenly take on 200 different ones — each requiring a different style, staff and skill?

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether technical innovations by construction industry small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with an environmental focus, require any specific circumstances for successful marketplace delivery.

A value tree of significant factors was developed from a literature review. This was tested by a survey of established technical innovators within SMEs in the area of Sydney and environs, using analytic hierarchy process methodology.

The regulatory environment was demonstrated to be much more important to environmental innovators than to others. Conversely the influence of clients and end users was less significant for the environmentally focused innovators.

The sample size was necessarily small because the subjects were all peer recognised technical innovators. Analysis of variance was used to identify significant differences between environmentally focused and other innovations among the survey respondents.

Performance-based standards were seen to be significant enablers for environmentally focused innovation delivery. A degree of flexibility in building regulations may be crucial to innovation delivery by SMEs.

The paper stresses the importance for regulators of reaching an understanding of the restrictions that prescriptive standards may put of those seeking to improve the environmental performance of the construction industry.

Complex projects require careful management. They may expose stakeholders to greater risks and place additional demands upon resources. In the initial stages of project development, however, little may be known about the nature and magnitude of such complexity. This paper aims to ensure that this gap is at least subjectively assessed and addressed.

Research, using focus group workshops with a convenience sample of construction professionals, was carried out to test the validity of a Project Early Stage Complexity Assessment Tool (PESCAT). The PESCAT concept brings together selected complexity theories and uses subjectively based measures for assessment.

The findings confirm that an early-stage project complexity assessment tool is practicable and can contribute to project management practice in the construction industry. It should be applied by individual project stakeholders using small teams of experienced staff. PESCAT explores project complexity through “filter” sets of perspective factors which should be customised to reflect the stakeholder’s role and processes in a project.

In the initial complexity assessment model, resolution space and uncertainty were tested as project complexity parameters. However, in subsequent versions of the tool, four measures (differentiation and differentiation uncertainty; interdependency and interdependency uncertainty) are used in an innovative way that focuses users’ attention more clearly and points to a more targeted approach for addressing project complexity. The value of our model lies in its practical application and the project management benefits it can deliver.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a structured and analytical model for the implantation of project communication management (PCM).

A survey was carried out with the support of the PMI São Paulo Chapter.

The research brought new evidence which, added to the identification of the main gaps and deficiencies found in the theory. The model then deals with project communication and reflects the advances in administration and organizational communication, enabling evolution in the area of project communication.

The fact that this work offers the view presented by just a part of one of the PMI Chapters is a research limitation. The model proposal offers a new approach for the understanding of the PCM process, structured and integrated into the organization.

This new vision allows better alignment of projects with the organizational structure of communication.

This study enables use for media professionals in organizations, enabling better communicability between people.

The model contributes to the understanding of communication in projects as a process with several dimensions, facilitating work in a structured integrated way, enabling a better degree of communicability in projects.

There are several contenders for the title of being the “pioneer of photography,” of which in France, Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre (1787–1851) is the most internationally famous. In Britain, it is widely accepted that although William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877) was not the first to produce photographs, he had a major contribution to the development of photography.

The purpose of this paper is to address the current theoretical gap in integrating knowledge and experience into Building Information Model (BIM) for risk management of bridge projects by developing a tailored Risk Breakdown Structure (RBS) and formalising an active link between the resulting RBS and BIM.

A three-step approach is used in this study to develop a tailored RBS for bridge projects and a conceptual model for the linkage between the RBS and BIM. First, the integrated bridge information model is in concept separated into four levels of contents (LOCs) and six technical systems based on analysis of the Industry Foundation Classes specification, a critical review of previous studies and authors’ project experience. The second step develops a knowledge-based risk database through an extensive collection of risk data, a process of data mining, and further assessment and translation of data. A critical analysis is conducted in the last step to determine on which level the different risks should be allocated to bridge projects and to propose a conceptual model for linking the tailored RBS to the four LOCs and six technical systems of BIM.

The findings suggest that the traditional method and BIM can be merged as an integrated solution for risk management by establishing the linkage between RBS and BIM. This solution can take advantage of both the traditional method and BIM for managing risks. On the one hand, RBS enables risk information to be stored in a formal structure, used and communicated effectively. On the other hand, some features of BIM such as 3D visualisation and 4D construction scheduling can facilitate the risk identification, analysis, and communication at an early project stage.

A limitation is that RBS is a qualitative technique and only plays a limited role in quantitative risk analysis. As a result, when implementing this proposed method, further techniques may be needed for assisting quantitative risk analysis, evaluation, and treatment. Another limitation is that the proposed method has not yet been implemented for validation in practice. Hence, recommendations for future research are to: improve the quantitative risk analysis and treatment capabilities of this proposed solution; develop computer tools to support the solution; integrate the linkage into a traditional workflow; and test this solution in some small and large projects for validation.

Through linking risk information to BIM, project participants could check and review the linked information for identifying potential risks and seeking possible mitigation measures, when project information is being transferred between different people or forwarded to the next phase.

This study contributes to the theoretical development for aligning traditional methods and BIM for risk management, by introducing a new conceptual model for linking RBS to BIM.