Henry Xue

Systems integration and collaboration in architecture, engineering, construction, and facilities management: A review

With the rapid advancement of information and communication technologies, particularly Internet and Web-based technologies during the past 15 years, various systems integration and collaboration technologies have been developed and deployed to different application domains, including architecture, engineering, construction, and facilities management (AEC/FM). These technologies provide a consistent set of solutions to support the collaborative creation, management, dissemination, and use of information through the entire product and project lifecycle, and further to integrate people, processes, business systems, and information more effectively. This paper presents a comprehensive review of research literature on systems integration and collaboration in AEC/FM, and discusses challenging research issues and future research opportunities.

A testbed for localization and tracking in wireless sensor networks

This paper discusses the significance of the use of wireless sensor networks and the wireless node localization for applications in factory automation and facilities management. We present a testbed that has been developed for implementing and testing wireless localization algorithms within harsh and dynamic automation environments.

Collaborative Smart Home technologies for senior independent living: A review

This paper presents a review of the collaborative smart home technologies for senior independent living. It focuses on the major features that enable safe independent living for the seniors. Based on the investigation on about 30 projects or systems in the area of Smart Home for independent and assisted living, key research issues as well as underlying opportunities have been identified.

A 3-D indoor location tracking and visualization system based on wireless sensor networks

This paper describes a 3-D location tracking and visualization system using wireless sensor nodes in indoor environment. The system is based on modified radio-location fingerprinting algorithm and it uses inexpensive, programmable wireless embedded platforms operating in ZigBee wireless network protocol. The main emphasis of this study is on the ability to estimate the location of mobile wireless nodes in 3-D indoor spaces, without any costly infrastructure. The wireless nodes have been deployed in an experimental test bed, for location tracking and motion estimation. K-nearest neighbor algorithm has been implemented for location estimation over a set of radio location fingerprints collected in a 3-D space. A 3-D visualization interface has been generated in VRML in order to display the real-time sensor positions and the data in the 3-D world. Preliminary experimental results show that the proposed scheme can achieve accurate and stable location tracking in indoor environments.

A service-oriented system integration framework for community-based independent living spaces

Budget constraints, technological advances, and a growing elderly population are calling for major reforms in healthcare systems. The publicly managed and community-based independent living service provided for the elderly outside hospitals or long-term care institutions is a trend all over the world so that the healthcare systems would be sustainable in the future. We have started a long term initiative to integrate and develop innovative ICT solutions and construction technologies to provide quality and yet affordable supports for seniors to live safely and independently at their own homes. This paper presents some preliminary results on the development of a service-oriented system integration framework for community-based independent living spaces.

A heterogeneous sensors integration platform for independent living spaces

Continual advances in modern technologies make it feasible to build intelligent independent living spaces for the elderly and disabled. In the past few years, various sensors and medical devices have been commercially available for home healthcare applications, but still there is a lack of effort on integrating heterogeneous commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) sensors from various vendors to collect data and provide more flexibility in product selection for customers. In order to address this issue, this paper presents a heterogeneous sensors integration platform for independent living spaces. The proposed platform, which is based on Apache Thrift, can accomplish the tasks of data collection, organization, and storage through cross-language services. A prototype system has been implemented and integrated into an independent living space monitoring system to validate the proposed approach.

Effect of Past Delivery Practices on Current Conditions of Cast-Iron Water Pipes

AbstractCast-iron pipes installed between 1850 and the early 1960s in North America, United Kingdom, and European countries were produced in foundries located near growing urban centers. Their considerable weight, size (especially larger-diameter pipes), and limited transportation facilities made their handling and delivery to the installation site difficult. Historical anecdotal evidence exists to suggest that some cast-iron pipes may have been damaged during delivery. This paper examines different mechanical models to examine what specific conditions may have led to pipe damage during delivery and installation. Analyses show that if pipes did incur damage, then cracks were likely to have occurred on the inside of the pipe bell or spigot ends. Furthermore, it appears that the spigot ends of smaller-diameter pipes had higher risk of damage during delivery, whereas both bell and spigot ends faced increased risk of damage in larger-diameter pipes. Monte Carlo simulations were conducted to account for uncert...

WSN-based real-time data collection in independent living spaces

Collecting and analyzing real-time data of a distributed wireless sensor network system is very challenging since it combines a series of processes to continuously monitor and respond to a wide variety of events. This paper presents an event-driven, real-time data collection system architecture for an independent living spaces monitoring system. A service-replacement-based timestamp matching structure is also proposed to improve the systems robustness and maintainability. A prototype system has been developed to validate the proposed approach.

Integration of indoor localization with facility maintenance management

This paper proposes an architecture for integration of indoor localization systems and decision support systems and/or manufacturing executive systems. In this paper, an indoor localization integration architecture is introduced under the scenario of an intelligent building localization system to uncover the relations among the necessary components and functions. Implementation details are also thoroughly explored, including class diagrams, work flows and the interface of the key component. The proposed architecture has the advantages of scalability and reconfigurability. In this architecture, different types of wireless sensors technologies including WiFi, ZigBee and RFID can be integrated simultaneously to support “smart environments”. Information from different data sources is transparent to information consumers (application systems), which means they can track “real” time position information of the interested assets in spite of the data sources. An application has been designed and implemented with the proposed architecture.