• Energy Research

The article considers the effect of architectural volumetric design solutions on the demand for energy and material resources for a building. The method used in the research aims at determining the potential of measures reducing the energy losses of buildings without improving thermal properties of the external envelope elements or applying mechanical energy-saving devices. It has been found that buildings of similar areas but different external envelope areas have different demand for energy at their operation stage and different demand for building materials at the construction stage. It follows that the efforts aimed at determining the appropriate geometric properties of buildings and their effect on the demand for energy and material resources of a building, as well as possibilities to use them for maintaining this demand within reasonable limits, make sense. The size, compactness and geometric efficiency of a building as well as the criteria for their evaluation are considered while performing the co...

While designing the volume of a building, architectural solutions can be employed to achieve greater energy efficiency for the entire lifecycle of the building. However, currently this possibility is not sufficiently utilised. The paper provides a comparative analysis of architectural solutions, presenting the ones that not only allow for a reduction in energy losses through the external envelope of a building considering the local climatic conditions; but also make it possible to increase the use of energy from renewable resources. Santrauka Projektuojant pastatų tūrius yra galimybė, pasitelkus architektūrinius sprendinius, pasiekti didesnį energinį efektyvumą viso jų gyvavimo laikotarpiu, tačiau šiuo metu tuo naudojamasi nepakankamai. Darbe atlikta architektūrinių sprendinių lyginamoji analizė, kurios metu pristatomi sprendimai, leidžiantys sumažinti energijos, prarandamos per pastato išorės atitvaras, kiekį atsižvelgiant į vietos klimato sąlygas, bei padidinti pastato suvartojamos energijos kiekį naudojant atsinaujinančiųjų šaltinių energiją.

Migration from a monolithic architecture to a microservice architecture is a complex challenge, which consists of issues such as microservices identification, code decomposition, commination between microservices, independent deployment, etc. One of the key issues is data storage adaptation to a microservice architecture. A monolithic architecture interacts with a single database, while in microservice architecture, data storage is decentralized, each microservice works independently and has its own private data storage. A viable option to fulfil different microservice persistence requirements is polyglot persistence, which is data storage technology selected according to the characteristics of each microservice need. This research aims to propose and evaluate the approach of monolith database migration into multi-model polyglot persistence based on microservice architecture. The novelty and relevance of the proposed approach are double, that is, it provides a general approach of how to conduct database migration from monolith architecture into a microservice architecture and allows the data model to be transformed into multi-model polyglot persistence. Migration from a mainframe monolith database to a multi-model polyglot persistence was performed as a proof-of-concept for the proposed migration approach. Quality attributes defined in the ISO/IEC 25012:2008 standard were used to evaluate and compare the data quality of the microservice with the multi-model polyglot persistence and the existing monolith mainframe database. Results of the research showed that the proposed approach can be used to conduct data storage migration from a monolith to microservice architecture and improve the quality of the consistency, understandability, availability, and portability attributes. Moreover, we expect that our results could inspire researchers and practitioners toward further work aimed to improve and automate the proposed approach.

Rapidly growing building information modelling (BIM) in construction offers a number of advantages and new opportunities of improving efficiency and effectiveness of the construction process and enhancing the use of emerging technology throughout the project’s lifecycle, not only in new buildings, but also in existing ones, including overall infrastructure. Recently, there has been a great number of publications discussing BIM advantages in construction. A number of review papers summarising BIM usage cases have been published. However, as the preliminary research shows, not all organizations use BIM because of its disadvantages. Therefore, the main aim of this research is to study the extent of available literature on BIM, to determine the current situation of BIM usage, and summarise publications related to the application of BIM. The current study is limited solely to papers available in SpringerLink, ScienceDirect and Thomson Reuters Web of Sciences scientific databases. The obtained results make it clear that BIM case studies and research in academic journals show high level of BIM implementation in practice, and advantages of BIM. However, there are some limitations of BIM usage in practice. Moreover, new trends in the evolving BIM are presented and discussed in this paper.

This paper presents a systematic mapping (SM) study with the aim to determine how Building Information Modeling (BIM) methodologies and technologies contribute to energy-related analyses over the course of the entire building life cycle. The method adopted in the study is based on a set of seven research questions. We used a mixed technique combining co-citation analysis and bibliographic coupling in order to analyze the publications’ datasets for the period 2010–2020. The main advantage and novelty of this study are that the joint dataset from the Scopus and Web of Science databases was used to develop the keyword map. The main findings of this study indicate that many BIM-based applications can be used to analyze the building energy performance at all stages of the building life cycle. However, the applications of BIM in conjunction with other information technologies are limited and are still in the initial stage. In the future, the main improvements should be focused on process, model, system, tool, use and information modeling. The most promising long-term solution is an open BIM framework based on open standards, which allows the integration of BIM and energy simulation tools and satisfies specific data exchange requirements.