Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) are exciting technologies that offer considerable potential benefits in all stages of the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) process, from initial planning and conceptual design to facility management and operations. VR and AR allow people to visualize and interact with a building or infrastructure design and construction process in ...

Integrating dedicated applications with a wireless LAN and WAN infrastructure, the COSMOS system provides "Construction Site Mobile Operations Support". In this paper, we focus on the approach taken in COSMOS for bandwidth management across the bottleneck satellite WAN link, particularly for supporting video conferencing between company headquarters and construction sites. We discuss the IETF Q...

The Public-Private Infrastructure Advisory Facility (PPIAF) is a multidonor technical assistance facility, launched in July 1999 with the purpose of helping developing countries improve the quality of their infrastructure through private sector involvement. PPIAF supported an activity in Bangladesh with the long-term goal of strengthening the capacity of the private sector and of micro-finance ...

The aim of the present work is to assess the potential long-distance effect of a high-speed railway line on the distribution of the European tree frog (Hyla arborea) in eastern France by combining graph-based analysis and species distribution models. This combination is a way to integrate patch-level connectivity metrics on different scales into a predictive model. The approach used is put in p...

The design and construction of shallow-buried tunnels in densely populated urban areas involve many challenges. The ground movements induced by tunneling effects pose potential risks to infrastructure such as surface buildings, pipelines, and roads. In this paper, a case study of the Zhongjie subway station located in Shenyang, China, is examined to investigate the key construction techniques a...

We are building a Malleable Interactive Software Toolkit (MIST), a tool set and infrastructure to simplify the design and construction of dynamically-reconfigurable (malleable) interactive software. Malleable software offers the end-user powerful tools to reshape their interactive environment on the fly. We aim to make the construction of such software straightforward, and to make reconfigurati...

High speed SONET rings are widely used as network infrastructure. In WDM/SONET rings, the SONET add/drop multiplexers (SADMs) can significantly increase the overall system cost. By traffic grooming, the number of SADMs as well as the number of wavelengths required can be reduced dramatically. Generally, traffic grooming includes two parts: circuit construction and circuit grooming. Efficient ci...

Modern computing infrastructures should enable realization of converged provisioning and governance operations on virtualized computing, storage and network resources used on behalf of users’ workloads. These workloads must have ensured sufficient access to the resources to satisfy required QoS. This requires flexible platforms providing functionality for construction, activation and governance...

The objective of infrastructure management is to provide optimal maintenance, rehabilitation and replacement (MR&R) policies for a system of facilities over a planning horizon. While most approaches in the literature have studied the decision-making process as a finite resource allocation problem, the impact of construction activities on the road network is often not accounted for. The state-of...

Article history: Received 26 September 2010 Received in revised form 5 April 2011 Accepted 7 April 2011 Available online 2 May 2011 The construction industry in countries experiencing severe economic crisis has vital importance to get out of stagnation because of its direct relations with 200 different sectors. In this study, the relationship between the construction growth data (infrastructure...