Team 3 - Group Project Reflection

As a group, we learned that people bring different ideas to the table; these ideas can be influenced culture, geography, and other outside factors.  We also learned the importance of stating your definition and expanding on the idea you are speaking about.  As a group, we all had different definitions of intelligent and green buildings, and your definition may take your project or paper in a different direction than someone else's.  Technology can be defined differently depending on the time period.  Technology is constantly evolving and influencing the design, construction, and operational phases of a building's life cycle. 

Group A Week 9 Story Post - Teaching Hospital

Group A:

Mark Odorizzi, Sarina Tufano, Dung Tran, Nay Ye Oo (Sonny), Alyssia Deutsch, Kerry Milligan

The Prologue:

Discussion of the current hospital situation - and the shortcomings that will be solved by an intelligent building

This story begins at a run down teaching hospital named “The Rickety”. Every doctor, nurse, intern, patient and visitor have been slightly creeped out by the small corridors, the uneven temperature distribution and the lack of new technologies. The lights were always flickering, making anyone in their presence feel uncomfortable. Those systems that did work, made erie noises and thumped randomly at any given time, but highly prefered to do so in the dead of night. Since this building was constructed before codes had been renewed, not many rooms had significant means of egress or sufficient natural lighting which only added to the sinister aura the building gave off.

In an effort to correct all of the dilemmas faced by this building and its occupants, a team of an architect, engineers, project managers, maintenance crews and hospital personnel got together and made a list of all their individual needs:

“WE NEED MORE ROOM!” - Dr. Milligan shouted

“WE NEED SENSORS TO REGULATE THE AIR QUALITY” - Mech. Engineer

“WE NEED A DATABASE TO KEEP OUR RECORDS” - Medical Students

“WE NEED UTILITIES THAT DON’T BREAK EVERY DAY” - Maintenance Head

“WE NEED QUIETER HVAC!” - Surgeons

“WE NEED FASTER WIFI” - EVERYONE

“WE NEED MORE MOTION SENSORS” - Dr. Milligan requested

“WE NEED MORE VIDEO SURVEILLANCE” - Project Manager   

“WE NEED MORE EASE OF ACCESS” - Architect

“WE NEED MORE LIGHT!” - Owners

“WE NEED CHEAPER BILLS!” - Maintenance Head

The hospital employee stakeholders in this story are Dr Milligan (because he was living through the issues and has the most knowledge about what a better space would look like), the project manager (in order to handle all of the differing inputs from the stakeholders, Sarina is needed to represent the hospital as a whole and keep the project on track), and the maintenance officials (Dung is the one who deals with the hospital facilities on a daily basis, and has input on how to best design the new space with maintenance considerations in mind and deals with the creepy doctor who complains about everything).

The non-hospital employee stakeholders in this story include the engineers (Structural: Mark wants to make sure the hospital is structurally sound to handle the heavy equipment and unpredictable live loads), the code compliance consultants (Hospitals have intricate codes applied to them, so Sonny is here to make sure we stick to those codes and provide a safe and acceptable working environment) and the construction management team (Foreman Rizzi needs to make sure the construction does not interfere with existing hospital operations, while still being efficient and on time and budget).

The Fix:

Discussion of the steps taken towards developing an intelligent building and how the new technologies will benefit the occupants/stakeholders.

Many new technologies will be implemented in this hospital so that it can provide a better work and teaching environment. These include code analysis for design and renovation, many types of sensors for occupancy evaluations, a structural/MEP BIM model for programming and design processes, a building program database for better record keeping easier programming and occupational evaluations, as well as robotics for construction methods and acoustic analysis for renovational aids.

To better be able to ventilate and heat/cool the hospital, a new high efficiency HVAC system will be installed. Since many patients and doctors are easily lost track of within the hospital, motion sensors and camera equipment will be installed. Along with that, databases will assist in record keeping methods that are highly effective and user friendly. Additionally, rooms will be made slightly more spacious and more windows will be incorporated with additions being rendered through BIM and all of its associating counterparts within the new model’s operation and functions. This will cause the hospital to become much more efficient in its teaching methods, which will gain it more patients and result in more money which can pay for the best hospital equipment and doctors to keep teaching new interns. Overall, the stakeholders will get large payoffs over the years following this renovation, the patients will become much more comfortable, and the hospital employees will be provided with a much better environment in which to work on a daily basis. In the end, this hospital will also have a much more pleasant facade and no longer be considered the creepy hospital it was once known for.   

Tran - Object-oriented Database

Object-oriented database (OODB) refers to a database model in which information is presented in the form of objects rather than data such as integers, strings or real numbers. The database is managed by object-oriented database management system (also known as OODBMS).

The interest in this type of database come from the needs of design support systems such as computer-aided software engineering, computer-aided manufacture or computer-aided design. These applications require databases that can handle complex data, and provide high performance dictated by interactive system.

In OODB, every entity is an object. While similar objects can be classified to classes and sub classes. An object has characteristic which are referred to as attributes. To be called an OODBMS, it must be a database management system, and an object-oriented system. Mandatory features of an object-oriented system are complex objects, object identity, encapsulation, classes, inheritance, overriding, extensibility and computational completeness.

The implementation of OODB is similar to relational database in the 70s. A primary feature of an OODBMS is that accessing objects in the database is done in a transparent manner such that interaction with persistent objects is no different from interacting with in-memory objects. This is very different from using a RDBMS in that there is no need to interact via a query sub-language like SQL. OODBMS were originally thought of to replace RDBMS because of their better fit with object-oriented programming languages. However, high switching cost, higher efficiency of RDBMS when dealing with simple data and relationship, the inclusion of object-oriented features in RDBMS to make them ORDBMS, and the emergence of object-relational mappers (ORMs) have made RDBMS successfully defend their dominance in the data center for server-side persistence

Sources:

Obasanjo, D. (n.d.). AN EXPLORATION OF OBJECT ORIENTED DATABASE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS.

Kim, W., Nicolas, J. M., & Nishio, S. (1990). Deductive and object-oriented databases: proceedings of the First International Conference on Deductive and Object-Oriented Databases (DOOD89), Kyoto Research Park, Kyoto, Japan, 4-6 December, 1989.

Dung,

Do you think that object-oriented database will soon replace relational database? Since relational database management system has many drawbacks such as the expensive of setting up and maintaining the database system, fast increase in complexity of information. 

Marino,
I agree with you that one of the greatest benefit of OODB is that objects are stored by classes and sub classes which make it easier for navigation, also give the system a better concurrency control.

Shaden,

During my co-op with the construction unit of PWD, I had a chance to use a database developed by Oracle Project Management to keep track of issues or change orders with clients. Files can be accessed, downloaded and edited from anywhere by people who involved in the project. Use of database in design offices really saved lots of time and money for owner and contractors.  

Week 5 - Bach Tran - B4 Underground Intelligent Building

Hello everyone,

Marino Da Costa and I, are going to research and design an underground intelligent building. Nowadays, people keep competing for constructing the tallest building in the world. We wonder if building taller and taller building make any sense. According to the latest report of Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, on average, up to 27% of the height of the top ten tallest buildings is vanity height (non-occupiable height). Take Burj Khalifa as an example, at 244 m, the vanity height of this building can be a stand-alone skyscraper. I think this is such a huge waste of money, labor and materials. Besides, skyscraper like these pose a higher risk for their surrounding in case of collapsing due to earthquake or other disasters. My partner and I wonder wouldn’t it be more reasonable to build deeper into the earth. We believe an underground building will have a higher chance of surviving disaster and less effects to the environment. In this project, we are going to look at previously built underground shelters, to learn about the probable construction materials, budget, as well as architectural and structural designs. In addition, we will need to identify issues and concerns for building underground structures, and attempt to integrate intelligent features to make such building efficient. Some of possible issues are waste disposal, energy sources, accessibility, building materials degradation, and so on. At the end, we are aiming to present a Revit model for our underground intelligent building.

Citation

http://www.ctbuh.org/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=k%2BK%2FgAvA7YU%3D&tabid=5837&language=en-US

Comments:

Shuyuan,

I would love to have a HVAC system with sensors and controls for my house. This winter I got a ridiculously high gas bill because of heating. I had to manually raise the temperature at night and kept forgetting to lower it in the morning, as the result the whole building was kept heating all day. I wonder if it would be possible to integrate such sensors and controls to an existing HVAC system, also will the cost of installing such system worth the cost of electricity or gas that it can save.

Dung Tran,

I really like the minimalist and futuristic look of this building. It would be interesting to see how you design and HVAC system for such building. I concern that a glass envelop like this will require a huge amount of heat in the winter. In addition, you might want to think about a security system or something that can ensure the privacy for the occupants if the building is to be built in an urban setting.

Allison Abad,

I am a big fan of Elon Musk and his ambitious vision of human living on Mars. I think finding a building method on Mars would be a very challenging task. I still think that it would be more realistic to have some astronauts on Mars to control all the robots and drones. In addition to limited energy sources, Mars is infamous for intense dust storms, thus you might want to take that in consideration. Good luck on your project!

Sensors and Controls for HVAC Systems

Group Members: Shuyuan Zhang & Shaden Dahroug

The following project was selected to research based on the interest and knowledge of the importance of HVAC systems within a building since it’s one of the main contributing factors of energy consumption within a building, whether during the summer or winter season or even spring since an HVAC system is required all year around to maintain the building’s condition to achieve comfort of occupants within a building, while maintaining indoor air quality. As sensors may be used to increase energy efficiency, it’s also important for maintenance of the required indoor condition as non-efficient sensors may lead a building to overheat or overcool, leading occupants of the building to feel uncomfortable and that may impact their productivity within a work environment.

Sensors and controls for HVAC systems is believed to be an important aspect of an intelligent buildings, because of its technological features that doesn’t require manual control from humans in order to maintain its requirements, where it’s control is achieved through sensors that only require implementing the program of the sensors with the building requirements to do its job of maintaining the buildings indoor air condition for occupant’s comfort.

The research will be focused on how sensors collect data for an HVAC system, and how the equipment or system process the data to control the indoor air conditions. In addition to exploring the advantage and disadvantage of each sensor to determine which would be the most relevant for an intelligent building to achieve maximum comfort of occupants and energy efficiency. In addition to determining what effects the performance of a given sensor.

The following sensors listed below are the sensor that will be researched for this project, while other parameters that will be put into consideration for the following project will be trying to understand the initial and maintenance cost of the following sensors as those are influential factors for an owner when selecting most component within a building.

o   Carbon-dioxide emission sensor

o   Occupancy sensor (movement)

o   Radiation sensor (heat)

o   Traditional temperature / humidity sensor

A model will also be created for research purposes to determine the relevance of our findings for the research, and that will be achieved through using eQuest for energy analysis to have a closer look at which sensor may truly be more energy efficient compared to the other sensors selected for research.  

The process of determining the relevance of our findings for the project will be a challenge as eQuest may not be enough for this evaluation, and that may lead to requiring database expertise in order to create a database to determine the relevance of the findings of the project.

Comments:

B4 - Term Project Description

Dung Tran,

A life on mars sounds interesting, and your project is very interesting but it leads me thinking how many spaceships and trips will this require for building one place “let’s say a house” and what are the environmental impacts of those spaceship as they leave earth and go into space, and since automated construction will definitely increase the traffic in space, I wonder if that will have an impact on the environment in space. I would also like to comment about your problem statement it shows that you have thoroughly thought the challenges that may come with your project.

Best of Luck on your project.

Anibaba - Project Description Blog Post

Malik Anibab,

I find the scope of your project interesting because it questions whether a building can be green and intelligent or just intelligent or just green. Probably increasing a building’s intelligence may be increasing a building’s energy consumption in some sort of way, but there is probably methods of using plants for energy production, where a building feeds energy of itself.

The following links below are articles about the BIQ building which is located in Hamburg, Germany. The building is interesting because it has double skin to make the building green, where the second skin is made out of a bioreactor. Thought of sharing since this may be helpful with your research.

Best of Luck on your project.

http://algadisk.eu/biq-first-building-in-the-world-with-bioreactor-facade/

https://www.iba-hamburg.de/en/themes-projects/the-building-exhibition-within-the-building-exhibition/smart-material-houses/biq/projekt/biq.html

 

Term Project Description

Zac Arnold,

It’s intelligent of you and Mark to take advantage of the project and choose Revit as a project to increase your familiarity with its use and try to determine its flaws through experimenting it yourselves which is an important thing to do, because you only get better by practicing using the software more and more. In addition, how you considered the scope of construction business as whole when it comes to general contractors, subcontractors, owners, etc.  

Best of Luck on your project.