LEXICAL AND ETHNOGRAPHIC DESCRIPTION OF THE KHAKASS TRADITIONAL DWELLINGS

В статье охарактеризованы лексемы, называющие традиционные жилища хакасов, а также дается их описание в этнографическом аспекте. Рассмотрены такие слова, как иб ‘дом; жилище, изба’, киис иб ‘войлочная юрта’, тос иб ‘берестяная юрта’, тирмелг иб ‘решетчатая юрта’, хараачылыг иб ‘юрта с обручем’, ахпайзац иб (фольк.) ‘богатый дом; дворец’, орге ‘дворец’, тура ‘здание; дом, изба’, иб - чурт ‘хозяйство; усадьба’, соол ‘избушка с особой печкой’, алачых ‘летнее хакасское жилище конусообразной формы’, этн. ‘временный свадебный шалаш’, одаг ‘шалаш’. Общетюркский пласт лексики составляют следующие наименования жилищ: иб, тура, чурт, алачых, одаг. Разнотипность построек находит отражение и в хакасских наименованиях жилых и хозяйственных построек. The article describes the lexemes that name traditional dwellings of the Khakass people, and also gives their description in an ethnographic aspect. Such words like ib ‘house; dwelling, hut’, kiis ib ‘felt yurt’, tos ib ‘birch yurt’, tirmelig ib ‘latticework yurt’, kharaachylyg ib ‘yurt with a hoop’, akh paizan ib (folk.) ‘rich house; palace’, yorge ‘palace’, tura ‘building; house, hut’, ib - churt ‘farm; farmstead’, sool ‘hut with a special stove’, alachykh ‘summer Khakass dwelling of a conical shape’, ethn. ‘temporary wedding hovel’, odag ‘hovel’ are considered. The common layer of vocabulary comprises the following names of dwellings: ib, tura, churt, alachykh, odag. The diversity of buildings is reflected in Khakass names of residential and commercial buildings.

Operational Carbon Change in Commercial Buildings under the Carbon Neutral Goal: A LASSO–WOA Approach

The rapid growth of energy consumption in commercial building operations has hindered the pace of carbon emission reduction in the building sector in China. This study used historical data to model the carbon emissions of commercial building operations, the LASSO regression was applied to estimate the model results, and the whale optimization algorithm was used to optimize the nonlinear parameter. The key findings show the following: (1) The major driving forces of carbon emissions from commercial buildings in China were found to be the population size and energy intensity of carbon emissions, and their elastic coefficients were 0.6346 and 0.2487, respectively. (2) The peak emissions of the commercial building sector were 1264.81 MtCO2, and the peak year was estimated to be 2030. Overall, this study analyzed the historical emission reduction levels and prospective peaks of carbon emissions from China’s commercial buildings from a new perspective. The research results are helpful for governments and decision makers to formulate effective emission reduction policies and can also provide references for the low-carbon development of other countries and regions.

MILP of multitask scheduling of geographically distributed maintenance tasks

Due to its proactive impact on the serviceability of components in a system, preventive maintenance plays an important role particularly in systems of geographically spread infrastructure such as utilities networks in commercial buildings. What makes such systems differ from the classical schemes is the routing and technicians' travel times. Besides, maintenance in commercial buildings is characterized by its short tasks’ durations and spatial distribution within and between different buildings, a class of problems that has not been suitably investigated. Although it is not trivial to assign particular duties solely to multi-skilled teams under limited time and capacity constraints, the problem becomes more challenging when travel routes, durations and service levels are considered during the execution of the daily maintenance tasks. To address this problem, we propose a Mixed Integer Linear Programming Model that considers the above settings. The model exact solution recommends collaborative choices that include the number of maintenance teams, the selected tasks, routes, tasks schedules, all detailed to days and teams. The model will reduce the cost of labor, replacement parts, penalties on service levels and travel time. The optimization model has been tested using different maintenance scenarios taken from a real maintenance provider in the UAE. Using CPLEX solver, the findings demonstrate an inspiring time utilization, schedules of minimal routing and high service levels using a minimum number of teams. Different travel speeds of diverse assortment of tasks, durations and cost settings have been tested for further sensitivity analysis.

Developing a Scoring System to Evaluate the Level of Smartness in Commercial Buildings: A Case of Sri Lanka

Smart buildings (SBs) are developed in many different ways and are self-proclaimed smart. There are a great number of publications introducing smart systems using a wider range of tools and sensors. However, the level of smartness, functions of the smart system, and the usefulness of the system are not the same, which may give a wrong impression to clients or potential buyers of a building. Developing a scoring system that enables determining the overall smartness of a building is necessary. Despite the necessity, there is a dearth of studies in this area. Hence, the purpose of this study is to develop a scoring system to evaluate the level of smartness of Sri Lankan commercial buildings. Thus, initially, smart criteria were identified, defined, and categorized through a literature survey. Subsequently, 35 experts in the commercial building sector were interviewed. Finally, the relative importance of the smart criteria was derived through the AHP technique, and accordingly, a scoring system was developed. The study identified six main criteria to evaluate the smartness of buildings in the scoring system. The automation criterion with the highest relative weight was concluded to be the dominant criterion (45.59%) in the scoring system. Communication and data sharing were placed at second with a relative weight of 18.76% and indicates the importance given by the study findings in establishing the backbones of SBs. Occupants’ comfort, energy management, occupants’ health and safety, and sustainability criterion were ranked third, fourth, fifth, and sixth within the scoring system. This study is one of the first to investigate in detail the contribution of both soft and hard services of a facility in determining the overall smartness of a building. Property developers in the commercial building sector can benefit from this study by recognizing the necessary criteria to be embedded in their SB development projects in order to attract more tenants and customers.

The Pedestrian's Office Building

<p>According to urban theorist Jan Gehl (2004), Wellington’s central business district (CBD) lacks pedestrian vibrancy. Gehl identifies impermeability, caused by many large footprint commercial buildings with closed street frontages and privatised ground floors, as the main weakness in the city’s urban fabric . This thesis seeks to address Gehl’s findings that commercial buildings create a sterile pedestrian environment because of their disengaged street frontages, lack of programmatic diversity and negative impact on the connectivity of the pedestrian network. A current lack of high end commercial office buildings in Wellington’s CBD creates an architectural opportunity to reconsider the way in which office buildings are integrated into the urban environment. In this thesis the office building is used as a tool to realistically investigate how these new buildings can address the urban issues raised by Gehl, and enhance the pedestrian experience. This research uses the design principles in Nan Ellin’s Integral Urbanism to find a solution for the urban problems identified by Gehl. Three architectural and urban principles are used as devices to integrate the vertical office tower into the horizontal streetscape; hybridity, porosity and connectivity. This design proposition investigates an office building on the corner of Jervois Quay and Willeston Street in the Wellington CBD. This site is identified as a particularly weak area of the urban fabric challenged by a disconnection from the nearby waterfront; by the six lane highway, Jervois Quay. The site-specific problem combined with the challenges of the market driven Wellington office typology is explored through an iterative design process to create a commercially feasible, site-specific design solution. Ultimately this research found that through applying urban design principles, office towers can better integrate into the urban environment to create a more pedestrian orientated city.</p>

Energy flexible commercial buildings and the electricity grid

<p>New Zealand’s energy and electricity system is likely to undergo serious changes with climate change and the decarbonisation of the grid playing a significant role. Research in New Zealand around flexibly managing the electricity grid using buildings has focused on thermoelectric appliances in the residential sector while there has been limited research and quantification of the energy flexibility offered by commercial buildings. Despite this, managing the grid using energy flexible commercial buildings represents an opportunity to achieve meaningful reductions in electricity demand from buildings that are far less numerous than residential buildings. The aim of this thesis was to establish whether energy flexible commercial buildings in New Zealand can maintain the current quality of indoor thermal comfort and achieve reductions in demand that are sufficiently large that grid operators consider them significant contributors to grid management. By understanding the contribution, we can understand whether energy flexible commercial buildings are worth further investigation. In this thesis, energy flexibility means the ability for a building to manage its demand and generation according to user needs, grid needs, and local climate conditions. Energy flexibility in commercial buildings could then support the integration of more variable renewable energy sources and increase demand response capability which is a cost-effective way to manage network constraints and reduce non-renewable electricity generation. Case studies of New Zealand commercial buildings represented as Building Energy Models (BEMs) were simulated under energy flexible operation in a building performance simulation software (EnergyPlus). The selected case studies were small commercial buildings less than 1,499m² in size and which all contained heat pumps. The buildings were of office, retail, and mixed-use types. Two simple energy flexibility strategies were simulated in the buildings and the results from each building were then aggregated and extrapolated across the New Zealand commercial building stock. The strategies simply shifted and shed heating electricity demand. This was done to test whether implementing basic energy flexibility strategies have the potential to reduce electricity demand by a meaningful magnitude. At best the commercial building stock’s peak demand could reduce by 177MW by energy flexibly operating 45% of the commercial building stock, this was equivalent to around 11,700 buildings. In this scenario heating was shifted to start 150 minutes earlier in the morning. The study concluded that there is energy flexibility potential in New Zealand commercial buildings that results in demand reductions sufficiently large enough for grid operators to consider significant for grid management. This could be achieved without seriously jeopardising the current quality of indoor thermal comfort and warrants further investigation into energy flexible commercial buildings. This thesis also presented a refined methodology and energy modelling practice that could be used by other researchers to model and evaluate energy flexible buildings without the need to recreate the same methodology.</p>