Civil Engineering Challenges Essay

1460 Words3 Pages

The civil engineering field is about gathering and interpreting data, being able to give technical presentations to colleagues, team work to design and build a project, projects range from the design and construction of dams, bridges, buildings, roads, and water supply systems. In most cases the works of engineers are admired and sought after. Engineers play an important role in the development and improvement of a society. Yet, like other technical and non-engineering careers the civil engineers also face issues, for example, regarding ethics, high energy building consumption, increased soil and coastal erosion, inadequate water quality, traffic congestion, and some poor infrastructures resilience to disasters. Another example is that unfortunately in the United Kingdom, the civil engineering industry is highly fragmented with 93% of companies having 14 or fewer employees which is not always a great idea, as written by John Miles in Civil Engineering Informatics. There is also a need to implement new professional and educational approaches to new challenges and new implications that are needed for the twenty-first century society. This paper will introduce and explain five different issues that civil engineers are currently facing and elaborate about how these challenges interrelate to each other.
One first issue is introduced in the article Civil Engineering Grand Challenges: Opportunities for Data Sensing, Information Analysis, and Knowledge Discovery written by several engineers. Ten current challenges were selected to be investigated further five have been included here. First to analyze was high building energy consumption, which includes: lightning, heating, cooling, and running of appliances. With the resource scarcity ...

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... is why is important to have larger engineering firms with more engineers working side-by-side so that there is team work and issues can be taken care of immediately.
In conclusion, civil engineers have a responsibility to deal with current issues in a professional and ethical manner for the benefit of society. The topics discusses included: high energy consumption of buildings, the need for efficient water resources, transportation planning, poor infrastructures doomed to failure, the need to have higher standards to become a licensed professional engineer, how globalization has affected all engineers, and the need to have more professional use advance engineering informatics. All these subjects were pondered about how these challenges can be overcome are there effective methods that engineers can apply today. Unfortunately, not all problems are easy to handle.

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