Golder Associates Ltd., teaming with the Seyem’ Qwantlen Business Group (Kwantlen First Nation), was retained by the Township of Langley to develop a model to predict the location of unrecorded archaeological sites on a 10,000 year-old landscape located in the Fraser River Valley, British Columbia. Conventional predictive modelling techniques are common practice however with the increased availability of more powerful computers and software there is a growing potential for using machine learning algorithms to predict a wider variety of archaeological site types with greater accuracy.
Monitoring and control earthmoving operations such as highways and dams construction; require the collection of large amounts of data. Collecting this data manually is time-consuming and it lacks accuracy, so there is a necessity for using automated data collection systems in such operations. Most of nowadays available data acquisition systems are costly back boxes, where the user can not use it based on his/her customised needs.
Usually, any construction project begins with the planning department preparing a construction schedule that is pushed onto the project team. The big up-front plan might cause delays in the construction process because it relies on predicting a lot in the future, so you need frequent updating of this plan throughout the execution. Agile is a project management approach that includes micro-planning tools to support construction contractors in the execution of projects.
The use of Building Information Modeling (BIM) processes and technologies is rapidly growing in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry. It is being widely implemented during the design and construction phases. However, the building models created in these phases are not suitable for the Operation and Maintenance Phase (O&M). These models lack useful data for O&M or include unnecessary items which affect the usability of models. This project aims to develop tools to improve the quality of models used for O&M.
The proposed research will follow four steps within the scope of this Mitacs grant:
1. Collect data from existing sources, including the CACB, regarding Canadian Schools of Architecture statistics;
2. Find gaps in the data collection and seek out the missing data from Schools of Architecture and/or the partner organizations;
3. Collate the data as a whole and begin quantitative analysis according to several questions outlined above (i.e. how many hours does each School devote to design studio instruction per week?);
4.
Cost overruns, schedule delays, and sometimes disputes and even litigations have been a pervasive issue in Canadian construction industry. This applied research study is commissioned to establish a solid empirical relationship between project delivery efficiencies and project owners upfront investment on design and consulting services. The study plans to employ personal interviews, project database development, and data analyses as the key research methods to disentangle the complex impact network of project performance from pre-project planning to the closing of a construction project.
The City of Montreal desires to evaluate the potential for the implementation of Multi-purpose Utility Tunnel (MUT) within its territory and to assess the overall benefits it could derive from it. This exercise would be initiated by a review of the state of the art to identify the criteria of choice and the associated benefits of developing MUT that have been used in the places around the world where MUT have been built. In a second step, we will work with the city to analyze the opportunity of building MUT by involving all the partners associated to the project.
Structural steel plate products such as buried bridges, culverts, and pipes, are entering states of distress. Present day, little is known about the severity of the different deterioration mechanisms occurring in these structures and even less is known on how rehabilitate them accordingly. The following proposed research project will investigate the deterioration and rehabilitation of these structures.
The scope of this research is to develop new equations for the load distributions beneath timber mats from a crawler crane, for various types of soil, by using numerical software. This would enable industrials to accurately estimate the behavior of stresses in soils, in order to reduce the costs of ground preparation for cranes by using fewer layers of timber mats, or reducing the amount of remedial ground work that may be needed under current calculation methods.
Nowadays, massive timber floor/roof systems are designed by a simplified approach that treats the floor/roof and the supporting beams separately, thus ignoring the composite action between these two elements. Including the composite action in the calculations has the potential to increase the stiffness of the systems and to make their design more competitive and cost-effective. The key to achieve the composite action is to have a very stiff connection between the members.
