Europe faces significant challenges in maintaining its aging infrastructure due to extreme weather events, fluctuating groundwater levels, and rising sustainability demands. Ensuring the safety and longevity of infrastructure is a critical priority, especially for public organizations responsible for asset management. Digital technologies have the potential to facilitate the scaling and automation of infrastructure maintenance while enabling the development of a data-driven standardized inspection methodology. This extended abstract is the first phase of a study that examines current structural inspection methods and lifecycle monitoring activities of the Dutch public and private entities. The preliminary findings presented here indicate a preference for data-driven approaches, though challenges in data collection, processing, personnel resources and analysis remain. The future work will experiment integrating advanced tools, such as artificial intelligence supported visual inspection, on the existing inspection datasets of these authorities for quantifying their readiness levels to the fully automated digital inspections.
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From the article: Abstract—By using agent technology, a versatile and modular monitoring system can be built. In this paper, such a multiagentbased monitoring system will be described. The system can be trained to detect several conditions in combination and react accordingly. Because of the distributed nature of the system, the concept can be used in many situations, especially when combinations of different sensor inputs are used. Another advantage of the approach presented in this paper is the fact that every monitoring system can be adapted to specific situations. As a case-study, a health monitoring system will be presented.
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Dealing with and maintaining high-quality standards in the design and construction phases is challenging, especially for on-site construction. Issues like improper implementation of building components and poor communication can widen the gap between design specifications and actual conditions. To prevent this, particularly for energy-efficient buildings, it is vital to develop resilient, sustainable strategies. These should optimize resource use, minimize environmental impact, and enhance livability, contributing to carbon neutrality by 2050 and climate change mitigation. Traditional post-occupancy evaluations, which identify defects after construction, are impractical for addressing energy performance gaps. A new, real-time inspection approach is necessary throughout the construction process. This paper suggests an innovative guideline for prefabricated buildings, emphasizing digital ‘self-instruction’ and ‘self-inspection’. These procedures ensure activities impacting quality adhere to specific instructions, drawings, and 3D models, incorporating the relevant acceptance criteria to verify completion. This methodology, promoting alignment with planned energy-efficient features, is supported by BIM-based software and Augmented Reality (AR) tools, embodying Industry 4.0 principles. BIM (Building Information Modeling) and AR bridge the gap between virtual design and actual construction, improving stakeholder communication and enabling real-time monitoring and adjustments. This integration fosters accuracy and efficiency, which are key for energy-efficient and nearly zero-energy buildings, marking a shift towards a more precise, collaborative, and environmentally sensible construction industry.
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Er is een toename van het aanbod van e-health-toepassingen in Nederland, dat blijkt onder meer uit de e-health monitor 2016 (www.e-health-monitor.nl). Eén van de aanbevelingen uit deze monitor is dat meer onderzoek moet plaatsvinden naar veilige en effectieve e-health-toepassingen. In dit artikel bundelen onderzoekers van verschillende kenniscentra hun ervaringen en beschrijven de door hen geleerde lessen die zijn gebaseerd op diverse onderzoeksprojecten.
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This paper reports about preparatory work for future standardization that is carried out through an EU coordination and support action titled IM-SAFE. It focuses on applied digital technologies for monitoring and safety, including predictive maintenance of bridges and tunnels. Amidst the improved affordability of digitalization technologies and techniques, the biggest challenge in monitoring and maintenance of bridges and tunnels is no longer about collecting data as much as possible, but about obtaining and exploiting meaningful data throughout the lifecycle of the built assets. An effective and efficient data-driven approach is important to al-low both human experts and computers to make accurate diagnostics, predictions, and decisions. Further standardization is seen as an important part to reach that goal. The work in IM-SAFE related to ICT standardization focuses on the following topics: (1) the general requirements and preconditions for high quality and cost-effective acquisition, transmission, storage and processing of monitoring datasets to ensure the data is fully accessible and machine-interpretable; (2) the relations between the future standards in structural engineering with the open ICT standards for interoperability, especially on Internet of Things (IoT), Building Information Model (BIM), Geographical Information System (GIS), and Semantic Linked Data (LD); (3) a common design of IT platforms to manage monitoring and asset management data of transport infrastructures; (4) the ways to facilitate data analytics technologies, including AI, to be applied for monitoring and asset management of transport infrastructures, and to assess the added value of data-driven approach next to physics-based modelling. With regard to these topics, this paper reports the outcomes from the expert and stakeholder consultations that recently took place within the IM-SAFE pan-European Community of Practice.
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From the article: "To extend the lifetime of products, an agent is connected to the product. This agent has several roles. It depends on the phase of the lifecycle what these roles will be. One of the roles in the usage or recycling phase is to negotiate for buying spare parts in case a part of the product is broken. The same agent can also decide to offer spare parts to other agents to reuse working parts of a broken product. To accomplish this idea, a marketplace for agents has to be set up, where the auctions can take place. To support this concept, blockchain technology has been used. Blockchains are a new type of technology, known from bitcoins, but there are other cases where blockchains can be used. Blockchain is known for its decentralisation, transparency and for making trustful transactions. In this paper the working of different types of blockchains will be briefly explained and determined if they can be useful for online auctions by agents. A prototype of the marketplace using blockchains has been built."
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This white paper is the result of a research project by Hogeschool Utrecht, Floryn, Researchable, and De Volksbank in the period November 2021-November 2022. The research project was a KIEM project1 granted by the Taskforce for Applied Research SIA. The goal of the research project was to identify the aspects that play a role in the implementation of the explainability of artificial intelligence (AI) systems in the Dutch financial sector. In this white paper, we present a checklist of the aspects that we derived from this research. The checklist contains checkpoints and related questions that need consideration to make explainability-related choices in different stages of the AI lifecycle. The goal of the checklist is to give designers and developers of AI systems a tool to ensure the AI system will give proper and meaningful explanations to each stakeholder.
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Digitale architectuur wordt beoefend door digitale architecten. Deze digitale architecten spelen een cruciale rol in het tijdig en betrouwbaar realiseren van IT-oplossingen. De Nederlandse godfather van IT Edsger Dijkstra zei in 1962 bij zijn inaugurele rede (Dijkstra, 1962): “Wij hebben geen betere machines omdat wij geen betere machines verdienen.” De achterliggende oorzaak, betoogde hij, was dat fabrikanten precies bouwden wat de kopers vroegen zonder dat de kopers in enige mate geremd werden door de beperkingen van de technologie. Dit gebeurde onder het motto “In order to live we must sell. And we must sell to perfect idiots". Het onderliggende probleem is dat de vertaling van de wensen van de klant in een werkend compromis niet is geslaagd. Dit is exact het pijnpunt, waar de digitale architect een cruciale rol. speelt. Een kundig architect is in staat met zijn omgeving tot een compromis te komen dat voor alle belanghebbenden acceptabel is. Alternatief is dat niet tot bouw besloten wordt. De vastlegging van het ontwerp van dat compromis gebeurt in de digitale architectuur en ontwerpdocumentatie van de oplossing.
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European clothing consumption has increased dramatically in recent decades, leading to a current average of 26 kg of textiles annually purchased per capita (EEA, 2019). While garments (and most of clothing’s environmental impacts) are produced in other parts of the world, European municipalities face a problem of increasing volumes of textile waste. Moreover, the revised waste directive of 2018 specifies that European Union countries will be obliged to collect textiles separately by 2025. This study investigates how these phenomena are affecting city-level policy and strategy, including but not limited to textile waste management. It builds on a comparative analysis of official documents informed by interviews with policy makers and waste management authorities in five European cities. The research points out that, in these cities, clothing environmental policy and other public initiatives are at varied levels of development. The paper identifies three kinds of measures, namely (a) improving separate collection, (b) waste prevention, and (c) consumption reduction. Reducing the share of textiles disposed of in general household waste (and therefore increasing separate collection) has been a central aim in cities where textiles fall under local waste regulation. The waste directive mentioned above makes separate collection of all textiles compulsory for EU members, leading to revisions in some cities’ collection systems. Some municipalities have gone one step further in preventing these textiles from reaching waste streams by supporting local initiatives for repair and reuse. The most advanced and recent approach is aiming at reductions in new clothing demand through citizen campaigns and monitoring the effect of repair and reuse actions in consumption levels. The comparative analysis leads to recommendations for future policy and strategy including developing the three approaches mentioned above simultaneously, further exploring measures for consumption reduction, and the integration of more concrete targets and monitoring plans, so that the most effective paths in social and environmental terms can be identified.
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In dit boek vindt u een beknopte weergave van de ideeën en plannen behorende bij de eerste twee lectoraten van het Kenniscentrum voor Procesinnovatie. In het eerste deel behandelt lector Extended Enterprise Studies Johan Versendaal het concept van de extended enterprise en belangrijke aandachtsgebieden daarbij zoals inkoopvolwassenheid, procesdenken, en e-business ontwikkelingen. Het succes van een extended enterprise is voor een groot deel afhankelijk van de kwaliteit van de architectuur en architecten die de bedrijfsvoering ondersteunen. Dit is dan ook het thema van het tweede deel van dit boek. Hierin neemt lector Architectuur voor Digitale Informatiesystemen Wiebe Wiersema u mee op een tocht die gaat van de opkomst van architectuur tot de knelpunten die zich voordoen binnen het hedendaagse informaticaonderwijs
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