Engineer wins 1st prize in nationwide competition to launch her career

Under the slogan "Innovative Construction Industry - Benefit from New Ideas and Shape the Future", 15 young talents from the construction industry were honored at the trade fair "bautec" in Berlin on February 21, 2018. With their submitted work, the winners of the annual competition "Built on IT" contribute to the digitalization of construction. The RKW Competence Center recognizes in the four areas: Architecture, Construction Management, Civil Engineering and the Industrial-Technical Area for special achievements. The 1st prize in the field of civil engineering was won by Constanze Matthus with her master's thesis on "BIM-based design of SHM-related processes and algorithms". With this, Ms. Matthus successfully completes her master's degree in structural engineering at Bauhaus University Weimar. Since then, she has been working as a planning engineer at the engineering firm IGS Ingenieure Weimar, where she is committed to the introduction of Building Information Modeling (BIM). BIM is an increasingly important, holistic digital methodology for building mapping, which supports the planning, construction and maintenance of structures.

As part of her master's thesis, Ms. Matthus succeeded for the first time in describing processes of automated structural health monitoring (SHM) and mapping them in a BIM-based manner. As a result of the work, a semantic model for the technology-independent, formal description of processes and algorithms as well as an extension proposal for the IFC standard (Industry Foundation Classes) for the BIM-based mapping of SHM-related processes and algorithms were created. Thus, the submitted work contributes to the complete BIM-based mapping of SHM systems. Furthermore, the results can be used for other application areas that require the mapping of programming.