Search

Greater opportunity now exists compared to 35 years ago for civil engineers to apply river ice knowledge to practical problems of planning, designing, and operating hydro-power facilities, water intakes, bridges, and other infrastructure along ice-covered rivers. This is due to major advancements made during this period in understanding the physical processes of river ice formation, growth and breakup, in developing instrumentation for acquisition of information on winter environments, and in developing numerical modelling tools. An increasing number of journal articles, as well as papers presented at the river ice workshops of the CGU Committee on River Ice Processes and the Environment (CRIPE) and the ice symposia of the International Association for Hydro-Environment Engineering and Research (IAHR) attest to the advancement in river ice science and engineering knowledge that has occurred during the past 35 years. This paper reviews the developments in river ice science and engineering from a Canadian perspective and briefly discusses future directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Canada exhibits high per capita energy consumption. This paper examines energy use in Canada by region and sector, focusing on four sectors most relevant to civil engineering activities: residential, commercial–institutional, construction, and transportation. Environmental impacts associated with major energy sources including coal, petroleum products, natural gas and electricity are reviewed. The relationships between energy consumption and infrastructure design are analysed. Opportunities for reductions are identified in building design, water and waste-water systems, urban form, and transportation. Large improvements in commercial and residential energy efficiency can be achieved through the implementation of existing technologies in building upgrades, retrofits, and rebuilds. Increasing surface albedos and more extensive use of vegetative shading and consideration of the geometric properties of urban canyons and their microclimatic effects also allow for considerable energy savings. The incorporation of mixed-modal transit, walking and cycling paths, and community-scale design as elements of long-term transportation planning and the development of alternative transportation technologies have the potential to considerably reduce per capita energy use. The development and implementation of alternative energy supply technologies include energy recovery from waste-water treatment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The benefits of intelligent transportation systems (ITS) are indirectly represented by the annual world market for ITS, which according to ITS Canada (2002) will be $90 billion CAN by 2011. Improved safety is often cited as the top goal of implementing ITS. Despite the magnitude of these investments and their underlying goal to improve transportation safety, there are deficiencies in the quantity and quality of reported ITS safety benefits. Many of the benefits reported to date suffer from poor data, lack of an evaluation framework, and inconsistent terminology used to attribute benefits to ITS application areas. This paper explores these issues, while attempting to address one of them, namely the lack of an evaluation framework for assessing the safety benefits of ITS. Accordingly, a unique framework is developed based on the Canadian ITS architecture. The framework includes the identification of evaluation metrics that are mapped to the market packages in the Canadian ITS architecture and correlated with each other to capture the "cause" and "effect" flow of benefits. This framework will benefit future ITS safety evaluations by providing a structure for undertaking evaluations using terminology consistent with the Canadian ITS architecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent advances in the fields of data communication and automated controls make the implementation of automated highway systems (AHSs) more possible. Currently, substantial research effort is being made on the design of intelligent transportation system (ITS) architectures in Europe, Japan, the United States, and Canada. These architectures, however, have major limitations inherit in the design methodology used. Most ITS developers use a process-oriented approach for the design of the architecture that reduces its quality attributes (stability and flexibility) to future changes. This paper presents an approach to implement object-oriented design methodology in the Canadian intelligent transportation system (C-ITS) architecture for AHS. It was also shown that the C-ITS architecture needs a backup communication system to be integrated within the C-ITS architecture. Such a backup system would aid the reliability of future transportation systems to be developed based on this architecture. The proposed C-ITS architecture promotes flexibility, stability, and communication and, as such, should be of interest to ITS developers and researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although bridges were among the first civil engineering structures to use structural health monitoring (SHM) technologies, research is now expanding to explore other types of applications, including Manitoba's famous Golden Boy statue. Global research is identifying the value of using SHM technologies for civil engineering applications. Structural health monitoring uses a variety of sensors to gather information about the behaviour of a structure. The information creates a valuable knowledge base that can be analyzed to help identify potential structural risks, develop safer and more efficient new structures, and determine more effective ways to rehabilitate existing structures. This paper briefly describes the history of the Manitoba Legislative Building and the Golden Boy and also the use of SHM technologies to help preserve the Golden Boy statue, an icon of provincial heritage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the editorial policy implemented by the "Canadian Journal of Civil Engineering." The journal, which is intended to reflect and stimulate the practice of civil engineering in Canada, is said to be recognized as the official technical journal of the Canadian Society for Civil Engineering and is published monthly by the National Research Council. It is not claimed to publish papers that are clearly in the domain of the "Canadian Geotechnical Journal" or the "Canadian Surveyor."