January 2003

BFRL Monthly Highlights

January 2003

February 2003

March 2003

April 2002

May 2002

PAST Highlights

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BFRL Researchers Publish Economic Tools in New R.S. Means Reference Book

BFRL’s Office of Applied Economics responded to an invitation by the R.S. Means Co. to write two chapters for their recently published book Green Building: Project Planning & Cost Estimating, A Practical Guide for Constructing Sustainable Buildings. Barbara Lippiatt describes in chapter 12 how the life-cycle assessment method and supporting NIST software, Building for Environmental and Economic Sustainability (BEES), quantifies the environmental and economic performance of a building product “from cradle to grave” and allows these impacts to be considered when selecting building materials. In chapter 13, Sieglinde Fuller describes the concepts and techniques of life-cycle costing—a method of economic evaluation especially well suited to weigh future benefits of green building features against the higher initial investment costs that are usually associated with sustainable building projects. The chapter also describes the NIST Building Life-Cycle Cost (BLCC) program—a tool that facilitates the application of the life-cycle cost method to building project analyses.

R.S. Means is North America’s leading supplier of up-to-date construction cost information that helps owners, developers, architects, engineers, and contractors plan and control the cost of new building construction and renovation.

Contact:
Bobbie Lippiatt , 301-975-6133 (BEES)
Linde Fuller , 301-975-6134 (BLCC)
 

ITL Contributes to Proposed NIST Distributed Testbed for First Responders

Over the past several months, ITL has been working on novel communications and networking technologies for first responders at disaster sites. The ITL effort is part of a NIST-wide project, the NIST Distributed Testbed for First Responders, to which BFRL and MEL are also contributing. The goal of the project is to save lives during natural or man-made emergencies by equipping first responders with highly capable systems and gear, based on the latest technological advances. Research in the Advanced Network Technologies Division has contributed to the NIST Distributed Testbed for First Responders in the following ways:

• ITL researchers built a wireless ad hoc network (WANET) consisting of Compaq iPAQ Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) running on the Linux operating system and equipped with IEEE 802.11b wireless local area network (WLAN) cards. The network demonstrates how first responders could communicate with each other and with those outside of their WANET at an emergency site. Requiring no prior infrastructure, the network self-organizes once the first responders converge on a disaster site. It reorganizes automatically every time a node leaves the network (perhaps due to destruction or to the physical departure of the person carrying the associated radio/handheld terminal). As such, the network is resilient to node and link failures, and its performance degrades gracefully in the face of such events.
  
  The network uses multihop communications to carry all sorts of traffic, such as full-duplex voice, video, text, and sensor data. Any message to be transmitted from node A to node B may go through several intermediary nodes. This helps conserve the battery power at each node, reducing interference for other communications taking place throughout the network and increasing the traffic-carrying capacity of the network. ITL’s use of the IEEE 802.11b technology in the testbed is for proof-of-concept purposes. Future standards for first responder communications and networking will be based on other varieties of wireless technology.
   
• ITL developed a method by which the WANET could determine the locations of all assets of interest, such as the first responders themselves and any civilians trapped at the disaster site, at any given time. While the Global Positioning System (GPS) provides that functionality in an outdoor environment where one has line-of-sight (LOS) communication with GPS satellites, other solutions are needed for the much harder indoor localization problem. ITL’s system relies on a number of stationary IEEE 802.11b WLAN nodes with known locations to determine the locations of the mobile nodes. This allows tracking and knowledge of the location of first responders during an emergency, facilitating the management of the disaster.
   
• ITL researchers carried out some experimentation with smart sensor networks based on WANET concepts. This includes work on collaborative signal processing algorithms that combine data from sensors of different types (heat, smoke, chemical, etc.) to arrive at more detailed information about the disaster and its evolution than can be obtained from single sensors, such as today’s smoke detectors.

These components, along with ongoing work in BFRL and MEL, will be integrated in the NIST Distributed Testbed for First Responders in the next several months. The Web site is http://w3.antd.nist.gov.
 

CONTACT:
Nader Moayeri (ITL), 301-975-3767
 

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