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Discusses the importance of adopting an integrated approach. The need for a wide range of services is initially required encompassing catering, communication, office furniture, equipment, etc. and all their sundry attachments plus the fabric of the building. Further shows that facilities management of buildings is necessary to operate effectively in business premises.

The paper examined the factors influencing the role of estate surveyors in facilities management (FM).

The study administered questionnaires on 247 practicing estate surveyors within Lagos metropolis, Nigeria in 2006. These were selected through alphabetic systematic sampling of estate surveyors from the list of financial members with designations (2004/2005) of the Lagos state branch of Nigerian Institution of Estate Surveyors and Valuers. The survey achieved a total response rate of 85 percent. Statistical tools employed in analyzing data were relative importance indices and factor analysis.

The findings suggest that training in FM and type of business of the organisation managed by the estate surveyor were significant factors that influence surveyors' participation in areas of core competence in FM.

Owing to time constraints, authors have only studied one location. No urban area can be representative of all cities in the country. Nevertheless, the results of the study should at least apply to the majority because most of the estate surveyors in Nigeria are based in Lagos.

The paper introduces an empirical approach to the discussion on role of estate surveyors in FM in Nigeria.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the advantages and disadvantages of introducing internal rent and to find the main success factors when introducing internal rent.

This paper’s analysis is based on experience from the introduction of internal rent models within four major Norwegian public organisations. The experience is documented after 19 semi-structured interviews with stakeholders representing the client organisations, property management and tenants.

The major advantage consist in that internal rent compels the different users to discipline concerning the use of space and make them adapt their use to fit the real needs and demand for space suited for their primary activities. The main disadvantage of internal rent consists in the temporary organisational noise that results from the introduction and the permanent extra bureaucratic burden it causes. The success factors for introduction of internal rent are: the users need to perceive the model as of real importance, the property management must take in enough funds to assure reliable maintenance and the client needs to avoid that the tenants think the model is constructed to seize funds.

The authors discuss a market-orientated approach to property management, namely, introducing internal rent models. It is more than a decade ago since internal rent was first introduced in the analysed public organisations. Now it is possible to identify the success factors – related to the advantages and disadvantages – from this introduction.

The management of public real estate assets by government agencies has been in place for many years as government agencies own their real estate assets in order to provide services to their communities. The management process becomes progressively complex and difficult because real estate ownership by agencies increases in amount, value and diversity over time. The purpose of this paper is to explore the current characteristics of the real estate management practice that is being implemented by the Malaysian Government agencies.

A qualitative approach has been used for this study where the data were collected through the use of interviews. The respondents to the study were government officers who execute real estate management functions within the ministries. The collected data were subsequently analyzed through the framework analysis method.

The results have shown that eight characteristics can be used to illustrate how the government's real estate assets are managed by the agencies. The characteristics include ad hoc management, a reactive approach, stages of implementation based on property life cycle, more focus on the maintenance management function, management by insufficient and non‐expert staff, management by fragmented departments, lack of information management systems and lack of performance measurement.

Most of these characteristics proved that the practice of real estate management by government agencies is not being carried out efficiently and is unsystematic. Therefore, the Malaysian Federal Government should plan, design and implement a strategic approach to ensure all the negative characteristics are eliminated because, if left unattended, this practice is bound to produce increasingly negative impacts over time.

This paper exposes the status of real estate management practice being implemented by the Malaysian Federal Government agencies. The findings will allow the federal government to determine the advantages and disadvantages of its real estate management operations and could be used to evaluate the capabilities of its agencies. The research output may also be utilized as a reference point by other countries with similar governance structures to assist in improving their public sector real estate management processes.

The purpose of this paper is to justify the need to integrate facilities management (FM) into the development process (DP) and establish a framework that potentially serves as a guide to optimise the value of FM in the property development industry.

This study looks at the relevant literature to identify the factors that are hindering FM to effectively integrate in the DP. Subsequently, the authors intend to carry out interviews with various professionals in the property development industry in the UK to identify the best practices. This research uses qualitative and quantitative methods in order to establish an FM-DP integration framework.

The literature suggested that contribution of FM towards the property development industry is unquestionable. Surprisingly, in a real world FM has been given a low priority in the property development industry, resulting in Facilities Managers being inadequately integrated into the DP. There is currently no suitable generic mechanism that is practical in all stages of the DP to guide Facilities Managers and/or other professionals to integrate FM into the DP.

This study is to provide evidence that the property development industry needs a framework that potentially serves as a guide to optimise the value of FM in the DP.

This paper aims to develop an integrated and comprehensive framework for building and property management (BAPM) for state schools in New Zealand. The results are expected to clarify the complicated process and provide a guide for school boards to manage their property effectively and efficiently. It also seeks to explore the relationship between the key stakeholders and how this impacts the BAPM.

In addition, to review literature, qualitative data were obtained through semi-structured interviews with 16 top managers in state schools. The data analysis results were used to develop the framework using the integration definition for process modelling.

The findings contribute to understanding the processes in the BAPM in state schools of school board members by adding input, output, control and mechanism elements in each activity of the processes. The systematic models with main activities and people involved are presented as a guide for school boards in state schools in New Zealand. Challenges and issues in the processes are also identified to draw further study for both school boards and the Ministry of Education.

The research was conducted with the participation of stakeholders who are sampled from top managers in state schools in New Zealand. A larger scale of participants from other schools may generalise the findings further.

The research findings are based on the needs and requirements of the stakeholders to understand, implement and control the BAPM for their schools and aid them to achieve the best value for money spending on the management.

The paper highlights the complexity of the BAPM in schools, presents the roles and responsibilities of the school stakeholders and proposes a systematic framework to assist the school managers in this management process.

In his incisive analysis of academic tribalism, Stephen Balch (2004) argues that schools of thought can be catalysts or barriers to disciplinary inquiry, depending on the institutional setting. He cites physics, chemistry, and mathematics as fields in which competing schools of thought generally enhance the marketplace of ideas by increasing the scope and value of intellectual exchange (ibid., p. 2). Balch deems these disciplines “collegial” because, though “rivalries exist among hypotheses and investigators, there is general agreement on the means of resolving them and a strong sense of shared intellectual mission” which enable “internalized checks” to “keep things on the straight and narrow” (ibid., p. 4). By contrast, Balch describes the social sciences and humanities as “adversarial disciplines” in which paradigmatic rivalries “shade into enmities, bear heavily on methods of verification as well as the substance of disputes, involve judgments of value as well as of fact, often reveal an absence of shared mission, and produce results whose employment outside academe is very frequently polemical” (ibid., p. 4). In these contexts, schools become impediments to “serious academic discourse about the human condition” (ibid., p. 2) as the collegial ideal of a “free and open marketplace of ideas” (ibid., p. 1) gives way to balkanized disciplines “divided into enduring factions whose partisans frequently treat their opponents more as foes than colleagues” (ibid., p. 4).

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate a novel use of a generalized Lennard‐Jones (LJ) force law in Physicomimetics, combined with offline evolutionary learning, for the control of swarms of robots moving through obstacle fields towards a goal. The paper then extends the paradigm to demonstrate the utility of a real‐time online adaptive approach named distributed agent evolution with dynamic adaptation to local unexpected scenarios (DAEDALUS).

To achieve the best performance, the parameters of the force law used in the Physicomimetics approach are optimized, using an evolutionary algorithm (EA) (offline learning). A weighted fitness function is utilized consisting of three components: a penalty for collisions, lack of swarm cohesion, and robots not reaching the goal. Each robot of the swarm is then given a slightly mutated copy of the optimized force law rule set found with offline learning and the robots are introduced to a more difficult environment. The online learning framework (DAEDALUS) is used for swarm adaptation in this more difficult environment.

The novel use of the generalized LJ force law combined with an EA surpasses the prior state‐of‐the‐art in the control of swarms of robots moving through obstacle fields. In addition, the DAEDALUS framework allows the swarms of robots to not only learn and share behavioral rules in changing environments (in real time), but also to learn the proper amount of behavioral exploration that is appropriate.

There are significant issues that arise with respect to “wall following methods” and “local minimum trap” problems. “Local minimum trap” problems have been observed in this paper, but this issue is not addressed in detail. The intention is to explore other approaches to develop more robust adaptive algorithms for online learning. It is believed that the learning of the proper amount of behavioral exploration can be accelerated.

In order to provide meaningful comparisons, this paper provides a more complete set of metrics than prior papers in this area. The paper examines the number of collisions between robots and obstacles, the distribution in time of the number of robots that reach the goal, and the connectivity of the formation as it moves.

This paper addresses the difficult task of moving a large number of robots in formation through a large number of obstacles. The important real‐world constraint of “obstructed perception” is modeled. The obstacle density is approximately three times the norm in the literature. The paper shows how concepts from population genetics can be used with swarms of agents to provide fast online adaptive learning in these challenging environments. In addition, this paper also presents a more complete set of metrics of performance.

Aarhus Kommunes Biblioteker (Teknisk Bibliotek), Ingerslevs Plads 7, Aarhus, Denmark. Representative: V. NEDERGAARD PEDERSEN (Librarian).