Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

The experience gathered from both the academic world and the industry sector is that there is a strong business argument for more sustainable construction. Being sustainable is as much about efficient profitorientated practice and value for money as it is about helping the environment. Yet, despite the great potentials and advantages seen in the development of approaches towards sustainable building, progress in this field has been rather slow.

In order to address the need for catalyzing initiatives in sustainable building, the project SmartLIFE, an European initiative aimed at surveying provisions and needs as well as fostering awareness on sustainable construction among students across Europe, has been created.

This paper presents the experiences from SmartLIFE and the rationale behind the project, which is the need to develop approaches and methods which may further the implementation of sustainable construction into practice. In addition, the paper describes the project structure and methods to be developed as part of the project, which caters for the introduction of a sustainability dimension as part of construction projects. Finally, the paper considers the extent to which sustainable construction may play its part in delivering sustainable communities.

With the IT (Information Technology) Revolution in the 21 century, many cities have developed strong infrastructural communication networks. It is expected that well-built communication networks will diminish people’s need for traveling. Subsequently, the decreased traffic would lead to reduced energy consumption in transport. The purpose of this study is to investigate the environmental impact resulting from changes in traveling activities as a result of an enhanced communication infrastructure supported by ICTs. We have made a preliminary study to examine the relations between the use of ICTs and people’s mobility. The impact on the environment was further analyzed using regression analysis. This study aims to provide some information about the potential of ICTs on the environment.

Emerging technologies have enabled many companies to collect a tremendous amount of data on their customers, suppliers and partners. How to deal with the very large database in supply chain management is a very important problem. A large amount of data is likely to be gathered from the many activities along supply chains. This data must be warehoused and mined to identify patterns that can lead to better management and control of supply chain. One of the solution is using of data mining. Data mining is a process that uses a variety of data analysis tools to discover relationships in data that may be used to make valid predictions.

The state of North Rhine-Westphalia’s pilot project for Eco Industrial Parks aims to integrate ecological, economic, and social considerations into the planning, development and operation of new and existing industrial and commercial parks in the state. Toward this end, the Ministry is helping eight of the state’s communities to realize sustainable planning for pilot projects in various stages of development involving an extremely broad range of commercial and industrial park typologies and developmental phases. The project stakeholders are municipalities, economic development agencies, enterprises, and private investors. As part of a project-related kickoff event on April 11, 2006, the state of North Rhine-Westphalia granted participating municipalities the status of Eco Industrial Park partners for the project.

A knowledge acquisition process that has been implemented by a virtual team for the development of a knowledge based early warning system in Material Recovery Facilities (MRFs) operations will be presented. During the process, hazard and risk analysis techniques have been used extensively. In this paper emphasis will be given on the: a) activities and workflow, b) communication methods and tools used, c) the model of collaboration The result was to acquire and codify the complicated picture of the events, which are acting as triggering mechanisms to a number of operational problems, incidents and accidents during MRFs operations.

An interdisciplinary approach to Early Warning and Risk Management is described in this paper as well as the general technical implementation of Early Warning and Risk Management Systems. Based on this approach, a concept has been developed for the design of an Integrated System for Coastal Protection. In addition to this, as a prototype implementation of a modern environmental monitoring and surveillance system, a system for the remote monitoring of nuclear power plants is presented here in more detail, including a Web Portal to allow for public access. The concept, the architectural design and the user interface of Early Warning and Risk Management Systems have to meet high demands. It will be shown that only a close cooperation of all related disciplines is able to fulfill the catalogue of requirements and to provide a solution which is suitable for environmental monitoring and surveillance, for early warning and for emergency management.

The article presents the current development of a methodology to assess flood risks due to contaminants with a high spatial resolution. The integrated approach combines methods from flood risk analysis with those from contaminant risk assessment. It focuses on toxicological receptors of urban areas represented by land-use data. For each receptor risks are analyzed considering the hydrodynamic contaminant distribution and the exposure of specific receptors. These risks cover both the recurrence probability of certain flood events with their matter fluxes and the exposure of receptors with dose-response relationships. GIS is used for data management, calculation of algorithms and display of the results in a DSS.

Applying the two-dimensional model system Telemac2D, the transport of arsenic and oil during extreme flood events was modeled for the region Bitterfeld (Germany). Telemac2D includes sub-routines that describe hydrodynamics, transport and first-order partitioning of soluble and particle-bound pollutants. Oil spills were numerically treated as particulate pollutants with zero settling velocity. Simulations of the inundation of a small region after a dam-break revealed distinct small-scale contamination patterns and partly exhibited severe contamination. Comparison with measurements from the Mulde flood in August 2002 gives reasonable agreement. The model will be calibrated and validated by several measurements with sediment traps during flood events.

We present experiences from using the EcoClass life cycle assessment tool in participatory product development. EcoClass is designed as an easily accessible, user-friendly tool providing data on three emissions categories during production and utilization of urban transport vehicles. In contrast to most other LCA models, EcoClass allows online modifications of vehicle utilization parameters to reflect changes in behavior. Its use with lay people revealed that the model in its current version is well suited to raise awareness and provide information, whereas it still needs improvement before it can be used for detailed production decisions.

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is the most promising methodology to assess environmental impacts of products, services and processes. Its scope of application is constantly evolving, including e.g. application to regional scales and assessing societal consumption patterns. Apart from considering environmental impacts, extensions to the methodology including social and economic impacts are currently being discussed. One of those impacts is resource consumption. It has been argued that the methods for assessing resource consumption in LCA must come from thermodynamics, and must take account of the second law of thermodynamics (entropy law). The challenge arising from this, especially in respect to its applications and software implementation, is the increase in data requirements. While already being a data intensive methodology, including a thermodynamic measure for resource consumption in LCA will increase the data that needs to be handled significantly. This can only be managed by employing thermodynamic data bases and combining these with dedicated LCA software. I will present an approach that makes use of the scriptability of commercial LCA software (Umberto?) and combines LCA data with thermodynamic data where values are stored in a parameterized form. The script then calculates the thermodynamically defined resource consumption and makes it available to the visualization and analysis tools in the LCA software. Processes from the metallurgical sector serve as an illustrative case study.