High-rise buildings with a large proportion of transparent areas, where conventional external overheating protection cannot be used due to the wind loads, are often problematic from an energetic and comfort point of view. In this paper a glass façade system is examined, which controls the energy flows within the transparent building envelope. Two fluid-filled layers are implemented in a glass f...

High-end storage systems, such as those in large data centers, must service multiple independent workloads. Workloads often require predictable quality of service, despite the fact that they have to compete with other rapidly-changing workloads for access to common storage resources. We present a novel approach to providing performance guarantees in this highly-volatile scenario, in an efficien...

BACKGROUND Access to a quiet side in one's dwelling is thought to compensate for higher noise levels at the most exposed façade. It has also been indicated that noise from combined traffic sources causes more noise annoyance than equal average levels from either road traffic or railway noise separately. METHODS 2612 persons in Malmö, Sweden, answered to a residential environment survey includ...

This paper proposes an interactive goal-based method for designing daylit buildings. The lighting simulation tool which supports this process is a hybrid global illumination rendering method which efficiently computes annual daylighting metrics. The goal-based method uses a knowledge base populated using a set of previously completed simulations that quantify the effects of various façade desig...

In the last years, several robots for building façade cleaning have been designed and some prototypes have been developed. However, most of these robotics systems are too expensive to be introduced in the market or are only able to cope with very simple completely flat glass façades. Funded by the European Commission, a consortium formed by several European enterprises and research institutions...

In this paper, we describe an automatic method for segmentation of building façade images. First, individual façades are isolated from general city block images. This step is based on accumulation of directional color gradients, assuming that façade structures are aligned. Then sky region is detected based on segmentation approach and color marker extraction. Finally, the images are split in fl...

This paper discusses the automatic texturing of building facades from thermal infrared image sequences. A fully automatic method is presented to refine GPS based positions using a relative orientation of the image sequence and preknowledge of a given building model in a bundle adjustment process. The resulting refined orientation parameters are used to project the infrared images of the sequenc...