Modeling Construction Equipment in 4D Simulation and Application in VR Safety Training

Enhancing safety and productivity in construction sites is of principal importance, especially in congested sites. Scheduling and visualizing the construction progress in a Four-dimensional (4D) model with a high Level of Detail (LOD) are expected to improve safety, productivity, and constructability in construction sites. In spite of the large number of studies using Building Information Modeling (BIM) for visualization of the construction activities at the macro-level, these research works do not fully consider the scheduling and animating the equipment operations at the micro-level. This study aims to visualize the construction equipment activities to model the erection of a structure with prefabricated components along with other resources, such as workers and temporary equipment. The construction process is modeled in Fuzor Virtual Design and Construction (VDC) and the collision test is run to find the upcoming dangers. In addition, one of the areas where 4D can be used is for safety training. It is expected that the combination of 4D BIM with Virtual Reality (VR) improves the safety knowledge of construction workers, students, and equipment operators. Despite the large number of research works on the use of Three-dimensional (3D) VR in construction training, 4D VR is not sufficiently used for training purposes. This study aims to improve the safety knowledge of construction students by using a VR-based training approach. The specific objectives of the research are: (1) Identifying the requirements for construction equipment modeling and comparing the available commercial and research platforms in terms of visualizing, animating, and simulating equipment movements; (2) Animating and scheduling the construction processes at the micro-level in 4D BIM; and (3) Enhancing and evaluating the safety knowledge of construction management students in terms of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) and equipment-related hazards using VR. In the first stage, the construction 4D context was developed and the safety scenarios about PPE- and equipment-related hazards were added. Secondly, construction students were given the initial VR-based training regarding hazard scenarios. Then, their safety knowledge was tested and they were asked to express their learning experience. The conclusions of this research are as follows: (1) When equipment tasks are visualized and scheduled at the micro-level in 4D BIM, the conflicts can be detected in advance and the cycle time of equipment can be determined, leading to the improvement of safety, productivity, and constructability in construction sites; (2) VR safety training improves hazard recognition of construction students since they can experience risky conditions in virtual construction sites; and (3) The capability of students in identifying equipment-related hazards would improve when they experience safety risks applied in 4D VR

Development of Earthwork Ontology and its Application

ABSTRACT Development of Earthwork Ontology and its Application Alhusain Mohamed Taher Concordia University, 2021 In a typical construction project, a significant amount of information is communicated to various stakeholders at different phases of the project lifecycle. The communication of this information tends to be informal and ad-hoc in the majority of the cases, which makes it more susceptible to loss of information or misinterpretation. Earthwork operations, which are one of the main operations of construction projects, also struggle with the challenge of effective information communication. There is an apparent shortcoming regarding the unified structure for data and information exchange in this domain. The existing models and ontologies do not address the explicit semantic representation of earthwork operations. Accordingly, there is a need for a knowledge model to formalize the efficient communication of information. An ontological model can be used to organize the domain knowledge so that it can be utilized and reused by the stakeholders. The primary purpose of this study is to develop an ontology for the earthwork domain that can be used to create the semantics-based integration method to support the communications between the different disciplines and stakeholders in the earthwork domain. Accordingly, the objectives of this study are: (1) To extract the explicit and tacit knowledge required for the earthwork domain; (2) To formalize the extracted knowledge by developing the Earthwork Ontology (EW-Onto); (3) To develop methods for linking and coupling EW-onto with other existing relevant ontologies in the construction domain to extend its application for safety and productivity; and (4) To evaluate the integrated ontology (IEW-Onto) and apply the ontological model in supporting application development, which is a Multi-Agent System (MAS) in the earthwork domain. In the proposed framework, the ontology integrates the different components in the domain. The extended earthwork ontology (called Integrated Earthwork Ontology or IEW-Onto) is composed of the concepts, relationships, and axioms in this domain and can represent the semantic values of the entities and the relationships. Each entity is linked with other entities with different types of relationships, such as is-a, part-of, operates, and coordinates. IEW-Onto benefits from the available ontologies in the construction domain, and links with other ontologies, such as sensor and soil ontologies. IEW-Onto is used to build the earthwork operation model as a pattern to represent the operations and processes sequences, which provide a reusable pattern for several applications such as MAS. The developed MAS can cope with the complexity of earthwork operations’ communication at the fleet level and addresses safety issues. In the MAS, every piece of equipment is represented by a dedicated computer agent. This Ontology-based MAS is expected to improve the safety of earthwork operations. Different evaluation methods were used to evaluate EW-Onto and IEW-Onto, including checking consistency, survey, data-driven and application-based validations. The evaluation results show that both ontologies have consistency and provide a high level of clarity, richness, comprehensiveness, interpretability, and effectiveness of the presented knowledge in the earthwork domain

Improving construction plant safety using advanced ICT

In recent years, a number of advanced Information and Communication Technology (ICT) solutions have been developed to assist in the management of business processes and working environments. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tagging technology and mobile computing are two such technologies which have been adopted for use in hybrid systems because they can monitor and manage industrial health, safety and welfare activities.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo