A grid-based experiment environment in civil engineering research

Abstract

During the last decade, researchers in engineering felt the need for participating in an experiment conducted at a distant without experiencing the trouble of visiting the facility. In civil engineering, some huge experiment facilities are too expensive for a regular organization to afford. Thus, it can be effective to allow high-cost experiment facilities and experiment results to be shared by researchers at a distance. This paper proposes a research environment for civil engineers in a project called Korea Construction Engineering Development(KOCED), which links major civil engineering experiment facilities across the research community with grid technology. The supported research environment was designed to provide researchers with remote monitoring and restricted operation of facilities, sharing of experiment results, and interacting with other researchers. Based on this proposed grid environment, we developed a hybrid test model that consists of two physical experiment facility sites and one numerical simulation site that are geographically apart. The implemented prototype showed a possibility researchers in civil engineering could conduct a remote experiment that involves distributed experiment facilities, with grid-based research environment.