This is the first update I am writing to those interested in what the BEMNext Lab is doing at the moment: what are we working on?
Well, we are working on many things.
First of all, we are working hard on defining what our research area is and what we want to be involved in. Everybody who says that BEM – built environment modeling – could be anything, is right. On the one hand we need to narrow our scope and define it, so that is becomes clearer what we will be looking at. We are working very hard on this now and in the near future we will update the site with new pages which will give more explanation to the directions we will be diving into.
On the other hand, freedom is nice, because that means that we can venture into unknown territory and explore with restriction. This means we are open to work with everybody who would like to work with us and has an interested problem which we can help to solve. We will carefully manage that we don’t loose this.
So what defines the BEMNext Lab? What can we do? We are experts in applying computational methods (algorithms – optimisation – custom applications and systems – databases – etc.) to design and engineering problems. A lot of our research so far has focused on the design phases in the life-cycle of buildings, because clearly that is where computation is lacking the most and where we can win the most to make other approaches (e.g. BIM) in the later stage more sensible. However, we have a strong link to practice (through Arup) where we are also in touch with the other phases of the life-cycle.
The second thing I would like to mention that we are on a quest to try to find people who have interesting problems (or solutions) in the areas I mentioned. These problems will partly drive our directions of research.
Third, the PhD and MSc students are working hard on their research projects, making good progress. Recently, Tijl Uijtenhaak has finished his graduation project on Multi-Disciplinary Optimisation (MDO) where we explored interesting new possibilities. You will definitely be seeing new projects in this area.
The last exciting thing I would like to mention is that we are writing a proposal for a cluster at SmartGeometry 2012 in Troy, USA on Material Intensities, where we would like to make several collaborative explorations. If you are interested, please feel free to drop me an e-mail and otherwise fingers crossed that we get selected so that you can participate in our workshop cluster!
Well, there are many other things I could talk about, but this post is getting a bit long… to be continued.
See you soon.
- Jeroen
