A lot of attention has been paid in the last years to urban freight transport (UFT) activities generated by specific market segments such as food, retail, or home deliveries, while relatively little attention has been paid to the transport of goods to and from construction sites in urban areas. Although transport of construction materials represents up to 30% of freight movements in cities and even more in terms of pollutant emissions. Using data collected over eight months in four construction sites, this paper provides a better understanding of the urban freight transport activity related to construction and presents the potential benefits of the implementation of construction consolidation centres (CCCs). A CCC is an innovative approach, which aims at increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of logistics processes by reducing the number of deliveries. Consequently, the use of a CCC in urban areas can reduce congestion and pollutant emissions due to construction freight movements. This paper presents results of CCC usage simulations for the four construction sites mentioned above. The results suggest that the distribution of goods to and from construction sites is peculiar as compared to other, better-known, urban supply chains and reinforce the call to researchers and decision makers from both private and public sides to devote more attention to this market segment.
Software requirement patterns have been proposed as an artifact for fostering requirements reuse. When we define these patterns for the functional part of a software system, we realize that most of patterns are specific of a software domain. This paper presents and analyzes a catalogue of functional software requirement patterns for the domain of content management, and gives an overview of how this catalogue has been constructed from the systematic analysis of 6 existing software specification documents with the support of expert assessment.
Software requirement reuse strategies are necessary to capitalize and reuse knowledge in the requirements engineering phase. The PABRE framework is designed to support requirement reuse through the use of software requirement patterns. It consists of a meta-model that describes the main concepts around the notion of pattern; a method to conduct the elicitation and documentation processes; a catalogue of patterns; and a tool that supports the catalogue's management and use. In this chapter all these elements are presented in detail making emphasis on the construction, use and evolution of software requirement patterns. Furthermore, the chapter includes the construction of a catalogue of non-technical software requirement patterns for illustration purposes. catalogue of patterns for non-technical requirements. Finally, Section 5.7 presents some conclusions and future work. ContextThe work presented in this paper stems from the needs of the Public Research Centre Henri Tudor (TUDOR) at Luxembourg when conducting IT procurement projects over time. Since 2004, TUDOR works in collaboration with freelance and independent consultants. These consultants are federated in a business network that we refer as CASSIS. They are trained to innovative methods produced by research projects and they use these methods in industrial contexts. TUDOR monitors their activity to ensure that they do not deviate over the time. One of the main methodologies delivered to consultants is a requirement engineering method used to design Software Requirements Specification documents (SRS) for IT procurement projects in small and medium size companies [3].Consultants work in collaboration with customers to help them in identifying their needs for a new IT system supporting their business activities, and then selecting the most relevant system accordingly to their needs. In this particular context, requirements engineers' consultants define SRS for external customers and not for their internal purpose. Consultants' customers are usually looking both for an IT system and for its implementation. In other words, they have requirements towards an IT system and towards additional services. For this reason, the scope of the SRS often encompasses functional, non-functional and non-technical requirements.The initial goal of the SRS is to serve as a basis for a competitive procurement process. So their primary use is for IT sales managers to understand the needs of the customer and to propose a commercial bid. Only when this process is achieved, the SRS is used in second intend as source for the design or the customization of the selected IT system. So far, consultants and TUDOR have performed more than 40 projects in compliance with the methodology. The initial approach for capitalising requirements knowledge among the consultants was quite basic. It consisted in re-using fragments of a former SRS as a basis to build the new SRS. This approach was simple to use but required to be aware of the former projects, which was not easy for the consultants due to t...
Software Requirement Patterns (SRP) have been proposed as an artifact for fostering requirements reuse. PABRE is a framework that promotes the use of SRP as a means for requirements elicitation, validation and documentation in the context of IT procurement projects. In this paper, we present a catalogue of non-technical SRP included in the framework and present in detail some of them. We also introduce the motivation to arrive to these patterns.
Efficient logistics in urban areas is crucial for construction companies since building materials account for 30–40% of all construction costs and the space on site is highly constrained. To face these challenges, actions coming from both public and private decision-makers to find more sustainable solutions related to the distribution of building materials in urban areas become urgent. Although barely used in such contexts, can decision support systems be of support, and for who and for which purpose? This paper proposes a set of decision support systems addressing public and private decision-makers to improve the construction logistics and supply chain with evidence-based decision-making mechanisms. Those systems are, in particular, a public participatory geographical information system for determining the impact of policy measures, a consolidation center locator, a consolidation center planner, and an innovation measures selector. The paper explains how these decision support systems are settled and experimented from the analysis of pilot sites in European cities and in collaboration with the companies. Our diverse experiments demonstrate that data-driven decision-making is worth it to trigger thought on improvement measures for construction freight transport in urban area. We conclude that additional attention should be devoted to this specific sector.
Transport in construction is responsible for up to 30% of freight movement in cities, with a subsequent impact in terms of pollutant emissions. Different solutions have been provided to alleviate the negative impact of freight transport related to construction activity, although no guidance has been provided for replicability in cities. One solution whose potential benefits are being studied with the support of policy makers is Construction Consolidation Centres (CCC). This paper proposes a method based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and provides an index based on 45 indicators to evaluate the suitability of the implementation of a CCC in terms of the pillars of sustainability in combination with a technical pillar. Three real construction projects were assessed in Luxembourg City, Paris, and Valencia. Two critical attributes were identified: the estimated operational costs of the construction company and the potential demand level in the area. The results of the analysis allow for: (i) the extraction of knowledge related to the sustainability of the construction project, and (ii) logistics to be integrated into the planning and design stages of the construction activity. Furthermore, a general structure is also proposed for integrating other construction solutions where CCC is not suitable.
This paper proposes a framework that supports the collection and classification of information about the features of a city relevant to Urban Freight Transport (UFT). The information is organized in a framework of 28 different layers that are then stored in a Geographic Information System (GIS) tool to enable efficient data retrieval and effective information graphical display. The resulting GIS tool thus represents a decision support system for UFT problems, providing decision makers and stakeholders with a wide range of easy to understand information aimed to support the identification and preliminary evaluation of UFT solutions. Moreover, by providing a standardized set of features and sources of information, the framework enables the comparison of different cities. To illustrate the benefits, prototypical real-scale tests based on the framework have been realized in two mid-sized European cities: Bergamo (North of Italy) and Luxembourg. For both cities, data were mainly collected from publicly available sources and organized according to the framework. The data and information collected have been used in collaboration with the stakeholders in order to identify the priorities of intervention and evaluate alternative UFT solutions. The real-scale applications confirmed the usability and effectiveness of the framework in engaging stakeholders and support the process of envisioning shared UFT solutions.
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