European Conference on Product and Process Modeling 2020-2021

Title:

BIM-based Design of Megatall Projects: Lakhta Center Case

Abstract:

Lakhta Center in Saint-Petersburg , Europe's tallest building and the world's northernmost supertall skyscraper was possibly the most complex object the world to design and build. With non-orthogonal geometry, curved helix/spiral façade envelopes and non-repetitive floors (neither of floors plans repeat each other) this project would probably take few decades to design and deliver by conventional ways , that designers and engineers used to operate before BIM and 3D-modelling replaced the drawing boards. To withstand some of the most extreme climate conditions in Europe while exceeding Russia's rigorous energy and safety requirements and achieving LEED Platinum certification—was an ambitious task for design and engineering. Architecturally organic form of the Lakhta Center tower consists of five wings that twist almost 90 degrees (0.82 degrees per floor), tapering to the very top of the spire - so none of its 89 floors repeat, and this inhabitable sculpture's extremely complex geometry can only be handled through 3D modeling and BIM software, as vitally important toolkit, that helped to avoid a large number of serious mistakes during design and further installation. The team constantly worked out the geometric conflicts between different elements and systems in the design process. Ultimately, designing the Lakhta Center was a tremendous challenge: there were so many unique elements—architectural, structural, and engineering—so we had to develop more than 6,000 new Revit families. The BIM model was developed with an LOD of 400 and immediately after its completion it was passed to the owner for operation and maintenance to continue its post-construction mission.

Biography:

With 25 years of international experience in architecture and masterplanning Philipp Nikandrov is a leading Russian architect with substantial expertise in large scale, complex and unique projects of high-rise typology. His design approach creates the route between contextualism and minimalism, reaching the complexity through simplicity. The strong identity in his concepts is always rooted in architectural metaphors derived from site context, history of the place and cultural background of the project in a way that the final form creates the symbol, project logo and recognizable icon on the skyline.

Since joining international company RMJM in 1997 Philipp served as senior designer and project architect in some of the most prestigious projects, working in the firm’s offices in UK, Middle East and later in Russia. In 2011 after ending his 15 years international career in RMJM as director and European Studio co-principal Philipp joined the leading Russian design company GORPROJECT as its chief architect and principal designer, managing few high-rise projects in Moscow and Saint-Petersburg. As design team leader Philipp successfully participated in many prestigious international and regional design competitions, and one of the most notable amongst his large-scale projects from competition to realization was Okhta Centre (2006-2010) and later Lakhta Centre (from 2011) - Gazprom HQ in Saint-Petersburg with 465m tower component, which is currently under construction and will rank as Europe’s tallest skyscraper targeting LEED Gold certification for its achievements in sustainable design.

As chief designer and project architect Philipp has delivered the iconic Evolution Tower from its earlier concept to completion (2004-2015). The jewel of Moscow City high-rise cluster Evolution Tower received many international and national awards (second place in Emporis Skyscraper Awards in 2016, the featured finalist of 2015 CTBUH Best Tall Building Awards and finalist of MIPIM Award 2016, etc).

Philipp is currently working on the design of adjacent plot, where civic piazza with amphitheatre forms the main open public space of Moscow City business downtown with its centerpiece building, featuring the world’s largest clock observed from the surrounding towers.

Philipp Nikandrov is an author of many high-profile publications and participant of architectural exhibitions and international conferences such as CTBUH, UNESCO World Heritage, Forum 100+, Skyscrapers Asia Summit 2017 in Singapore (as its chairman).

Title:

A Description Logic Journey

Abstract:

Description Logics (DLs) are a well-investigated family of logic-based knowledge representation formalisms, which are frequently used to formalize ontologies in various application areas such as the Semantic Web, biology, medicine, mechanical engineering, chemical process engineering, civil engineering, and situation recognition. An important design goal when developing a DL is to find a good compromise between the expressive-ness of the representation language and the complexity of reasoning (i.e., computing implicit consequences of the formal statements in the ontology). In the first wave of DL research, the trend was to go towards more expressive DLs by adding new concept constructors, which were motivated by specific applications, but turned out to be useful also in other domains. Whereas reasoning in the obtained expressive DLs had a high worst-case complexity, highly optimized DL systems nevertheless behaved well in practice. With the adoption of the DL-based standard ontology language OWL, the number and the size of ontologies grew rapidly, which made efficient reasoning all the more important. This triggered a second wave of DL research, in which lightweight DLs with tractable reasoning problems (i.e., ones solvable in polynomial-time) were designed, such as the members of the EL family. Another trend was that ontology-based reasoning about data became more important, which led to the development of the DL-Lite family of DLs, which allowed reducing reasoning about data with respect to DL-Light ontologies to answering relational database queries. It then became apparent that the specialized algorithms developed for lightweight DLs, such as the consequence-based reasoning procedures for EL, could also be adapted to more expressive DLs. Although these algorithms are then no longer guaranteed to run in polynomial time, they show a “pay as you go” behavior, i.e., they can deal with the expressive language, but are the more efficient the less “costly” concept constructors are used in the ontology. Due to the research efforts of the last 30 years, the DL community can no offer a large portfolio of different representation languages and reasoning systems to ontology engineers and users of ontologies, from which they can choose the language and system that best fits the application at hand.

Biography:

Franz Baader is full Professor for Theoretical Computer Science at TU Dresden (Germany) since 2002 and Director of the Institute for Theoretical Computer Science at TU Dresden since 2005. From 2012 to 201he was Dean of the Faculty of Computer Science of TU Dresden. He has received his doctoral degree (Dr.-Ing.) in Computer Science from the University of Erlangen Nürnberg in 1989, and from 1989 to 1993 was Senior scientist and Project leader at the Germany Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Kaiserslautern and Saarbrücken. From 1993 to 2002 he was professor for Theoretical Computer Science at RWTH Aachen.

His main research area is Logic in Computer Science, and there in particular Automated Deduction and Knowledge Representation. He and his research group have worked on Description Logics for 30 years, and have laid the the logical and algorithmic foundations for the Description Logics underlying OWL and the OWL 2 profile OWL 2 EL. Franz Baader is co-editor of the highly-cited Description Logic Handbook and co-author of the first textbook on Description Logics, both published by Cambridge University Press. He has published more than 250 research articles in international conferences and journals. He is a fellow of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI) since 2004 and a member of the Academia Europe since 2011.

Title:

OpenBIM. Quarter Centure Development and Perspectives of the IFC standard

Biography:

Dr. Thomas Liebich holds a Diploma in Architecture and a PhD from the Bauhaus University Weimar. Over the last 10 years he worked actively on development and introduction of digital methods in design and construction with focus on Building Information Modeling, in particular on open BIM.

Thomas is managing partner of AEC3 Deutschland GmbH, a consulting firm delivering dedicated services for specifying and applying building information modeling methods and interoperability for the participants of construction projects. He is consulting government agencies, owners, operators, contractors and general designers on using BIM for collaborative work, including business process improvement.

Another focus of his professional life is standardization. He is leading the buildingSMART International team for developing the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) since 1999. He is the convener of the ISO working group TC 59/SC 13/JWG 12 for data sharing in construction and of the European counterpart CEN/TC 442/WG 02 on Information Exchanges for BIM. In Germany he is the chairman of the DIN committee for BIM.

Major projects he carried out in his professional career include the world's first automatic code checking system in Singapore, the technical support for the first international architectural contest requiring openBIM - the National Museum in Oslo Norway, and the development of open BIM guidelines and validation process for the US Army Corps of Engineers in Germany. He is the co-author of the recent BIM Guide for Germany developed for the Federal Agency for Buildings, City Planning and Urban Affairs, contributed to the Road Map for Digital Design and Construction for the German Ministry of Transportation and Digital Infrastructure, BMVI, and is the co-lead for the scientific assessment of the first BIM pilots on infrastructure projects in Germany. He is part of the German BIM Consortia to support the BIM Roadmap 2020 and for the assessment of the 13 BIM pilots of Deutsche Bahn on behalf of BMVI.

He has been involved in many leading R&D projects, including the recent EU projects INTERLINK (object type library for road constructions). He consults the international IFC Rail project (China, France, Switzerland, Austria, Sweden, Finland) on data standards for railways (track, signal, communication and energy), including high-speed railways.

He also is involved in open BIM education and training activities, giving lectures at universities, and for professional associations.