1998 ◽  
Vol 25 (5) ◽  
pp. 819-828 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dany Hajjar ◽  
Simaan AbouRizk ◽  
Jianfei Xu

Computer simulation has been successfully implemented in the area of construction management. However, this success has generally been limited to the academic arena with the industry lagging far behind. This failure is partly due to the inherent complexity of general simulators and their inability to abstract the underlying modeling fundamentals. Special purpose simulation (SPS) is a framework developed to address the stated drawbacks by focusing on the needs of the construction practitioner. The idea is to build modeling environments tailored to the specific requirements of a given industry domain. This paper presents the development and implementation of a construction dewatering analysis framework based on the ideas of SPS. Object-oriented design and graphical user interfaces are used in the development of an abstraction layer between a steady state hydrological model and the user. The integration capability of the framework are then presented by constructing an optimization module and linking it to the main modeling environment. A case study is provided to demonstrate the usefulness, intuitiveness, and validity of the framework.Key words: simulation, special purpose simulation, construction dewatering, optimization, computer applications.


2007 ◽  
Vol 06 (04) ◽  
pp. 701-722 ◽  
Author(s):  
SIN BAN HO ◽  
IAN CHAI ◽  
CHUIE HONG TAN

Design patterns have become an important part of modern object-oriented design. It is necessary to evaluate and compare the effectiveness of different methods of pedagogical documentation in teaching design patterns. We compared patterns-style documentation with minimalist documentation. Patterns style disagrees with minimalism in that contextual information is not minimal — it usually contains information other than what needs to be done. The discoveries in this empirical study were two fold. First, the MANOVA (multivariate analyses of variance) shows that the effect of patterns-style documentation and minimalism are different. Second, we proposed a prediction model using a regression modeling technique. Considering these results, we formulate some guidelines for effective framework documentation by applying five of the design patterns within the Swing environment as our case study. Different documentation philosophies are better for different goals. For a simple task, use minimalist documentation. For a much more complex problem such involving five of the design patterns, our empirical results suggest using patterns-style documentation.


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