Big Data in the construction industry: A review of present status, opportunities, and future trends

© 2016 Elsevier Ltd The ability to process large amounts of data and to extract useful insights from data has revolutionised society. This phenomenon—dubbed as Big Data—has applications for a wide assortment of industries, including the construction industry. The construction industry already deals with large volumes of heterogeneous data; which is expected to increase exponentially as technologies such as sensor networks and the Internet of Things are commoditised. In this paper, we present a detailed survey of the literature, investigating the application of Big Data techniques in the construction industry. We reviewed related works published in the databases of American Association of Civil Engineers (ASCE), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), and Elsevier Science Direct Digital Library. While the application of data analytics in the construction industry is not new, the adoption of Big Data technologies in this industry remains at a nascent stage and lags the broad uptake of these technologies in other fields. To the best of our knowledge, there is currently no comprehensive survey of Big Data techniques in the context of the construction industry. This paper fills the void and presents a wide-ranging interdisciplinary review of literature of fields such as statistics, data mining and warehousing, machine learning, and Big Data Analytics in the context of the construction industry. We discuss the current state of adoption of Big Data in the construction industry and discuss the future potential of such technologies across the multiple domain-specific sub-areas of the construction industry. We also propose open issues and directions for future work along with potential pitfalls associated with Big Data adoption in the industry

The Integration of Architectural Design and Energy Modelling Software

Intelligent and integrated architectural design can substantially reduce carbon dioxide emissions from energy used in buildings. However, architects need new tools to help them to design enjoyable, comfortable, attractive and yet technically rigorous, low energy buildings. This thesis investigates, by means of a Research Through Design approach, how architectural software could be better designed to fulfil this need by the integration of design, energy simulation and decision support systems. The problem domain of the design of buildings with very low energy requirements was analysed. Two case studies were employed to investigate the limitations with current software. User and domain software requirements were recorded and analysed. Conflicting requirements were noted, in particular, dichotomous views of the building model. An investigation was carried out into the different interoperable standards that result in these views and rules on how to compose the building model as a series of Intelligent Spaces proposed. The Intelligent Spaces would be abstract volumes, enclosed by zero thickness surfaces, which have data and rules attached. Early prototyping of integrated software was carried out by means of a series of sketches and diagrammatic examples. The novel feature of the proposal is that it maintains both an abstract and detailed version of the building model through all stages of the building design and use. Key features of the proposed software are: 1) the ability to move iteratively between sketch to detailed design to explore different approaches to the building form and construction, 2) the setting and monitoring of relevant energy targets throughout the different building design stages and 3) the integration of an advisory system linked to energy targets to support decision making. This space based approach to the software has the potential to provide a ‘designerly’ front to the sophisticated processes of a Building Information Modelling environment

An evolutionary AI-based decision support system for urban regeneration planning

The renewal of derelict inner-city urban districts suffering from high levels of socio-economic deprivation and sustainability problems is one of the key research areas in urban planning and regeneration. Subject to a wide range of social, economical and environmental factors, decision support for an optimal allocation of residential and service lots within such districts is regarded as a complex task. Pre-assessment of various neighbourhood factors before the commencement of actual location allocation of various public services is considered paramount to the sutainable outcome of regeneration projects. Spatial assessment in such derelict built-up areas requires planning of lot assignment for residential buildings in a way to maximize accessibility to public services while minimizing the deprivation of built neighbourhood areas. However, the prediction of socio-economic deprivation impact on the regeneration districts in order to optimize the location-allocation of public service infrastructure is a complex task. This is generally due to the highly conflicting nature of various service structures with various socio-economic and environmental factors. In regards to the problem given above, this thesis presents the development of an evolutionary AI-based decision support systemto assist planners with the assessment and optimization of regeneration districts. The work develops an Adaptive Network Based Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) based module to assess neighbourhood districts for various deprivation factors. Additionally an evolutionary genetic algorithms based solution is implemented to optimize various urban regeneration layouts based upon the prior deprivation assessment model. The two-tiered framework initially assesses socio-cultural deprivation levels of employment, health, crime and transport accessibility in neighbourhood areas and produces a deprivation impact matrix overthe regeneration layout lots based upon a trained, network-based fuzzy inference system. Based upon this impact matrix a genetic algorithm is developed to optimize the placement of various public services (shopping malls, primary schools, GPs and post offices) in a way that maximize the accessibility of all services to regenerated residential units as well as contribute to minimize the measure of deprivation of surrounding neighbourhood areas. The outcome of this research is evaluated over two real-world case studies presenting highly coherent results. The work ultimately produces a smart urban regeneration toolkit which provides designer and planner decision support in the form of a simulation toolkit.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Book of short Abstracts of the 11th International Symposium on Digital Earth

The Booklet is a collection of accepted short abstracts of the ISDE11 Symposium

Políticas de Copyright de Publicações Científicas em Repositórios Institucionais: O Caso do INESC TEC

A progressiva transformação das práticas científicas, impulsionada pelo desenvolvimento das novas Tecnologias de Informação e Comunicação (TIC), têm possibilitado aumentar o acesso à informação, caminhando gradualmente para uma abertura do ciclo de pesquisa. Isto permitirá resolver a longo prazo uma adversidade que se tem colocado aos investigadores, que passa pela existência de barreiras que limitam as condições de acesso, sejam estas geográficas ou financeiras. Apesar da produção científica ser dominada, maioritariamente, por grandes editoras comerciais, estando sujeita às regras por estas impostas, o Movimento do Acesso Aberto cuja primeira declaração pública, a Declaração de Budapeste (BOAI), é de 2002, vem propor alterações significativas que beneficiam os autores e os leitores. Este Movimento vem a ganhar importância em Portugal desde 2003, com a constituição do primeiro repositório institucional a nível nacional. Os repositórios institucionais surgiram como uma ferramenta de divulgação da produção científica de uma instituição, com o intuito de permitir abrir aos resultados da investigação, quer antes da publicação e do próprio processo de arbitragem (preprint), quer depois (postprint), e, consequentemente, aumentar a visibilidade do trabalho desenvolvido por um investigador e a respetiva instituição. O estudo apresentado, que passou por uma análise das políticas de copyright das publicações científicas mais relevantes do INESC TEC, permitiu não só perceber que as editoras adotam cada vez mais políticas que possibilitam o auto-arquivo das publicações em repositórios institucionais, como também que existe todo um trabalho de sensibilização a percorrer, não só para os investigadores, como para a instituição e toda a sociedade. A produção de um conjunto de recomendações, que passam pela implementação de uma política institucional que incentive o auto-arquivo das publicações desenvolvidas no âmbito institucional no repositório, serve como mote para uma maior valorização da produção científica do INESC TEC.The progressive transformation of scientific practices, driven by the development of new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), which made it possible to increase access to information, gradually moving towards an opening of the research cycle. This opening makes it possible to resolve, in the long term, the adversity that has been placed on researchers, which involves the existence of barriers that limit access conditions, whether geographical or financial. Although large commercial publishers predominantly dominate scientific production and subject it to the rules imposed by them, the Open Access movement whose first public declaration, the Budapest Declaration (BOAI), was in 2002, proposes significant changes that benefit the authors and the readers. This Movement has gained importance in Portugal since 2003, with the constitution of the first institutional repository at the national level. Institutional repositories have emerged as a tool for disseminating the scientific production of an institution to open the results of the research, both before publication and the preprint process and postprint, increase the visibility of work done by an investigator and his or her institution. The present study, which underwent an analysis of the copyright policies of INESC TEC most relevant scientific publications, allowed not only to realize that publishers are increasingly adopting policies that make it possible to self-archive publications in institutional repositories, all the work of raising awareness, not only for researchers but also for the institution and the whole society. The production of a set of recommendations, which go through the implementation of an institutional policy that encourages the self-archiving of the publications developed in the institutional scope in the repository, serves as a motto for a greater appreciation of the scientific production of INESC TEC

SIMULATING REALITY: TRAINING CITIZEN SCIENTISTS TO JUDGE STREAM HABITATS IN MULTISENSORY VIRTUAL REALITY

Citizen science is a form of crowdsourcing that allows volunteers to participate in scientific data collection and analysis. Many citizen scientists are engaged and motivated by science-based learning and discovery, but high training costs and limited resources often result in volunteers participating in unskilled work, leading to boredom and disengagement. Advances in immersive virtual reality (VR) have created opportunities to recreate physical environments with minimal cost, making it possible to train citizen scientists to make qualitative experiential judgments usually reserved for domain experts. This research trains citizen scientists to assess outdoor stream habitats using StreamBED VR, a multisensory VR training platform. This research offers the following contributions: 1. A study of how expert and novice water monitors make qualitative assessments of outdoor stream habitats using an EPA qualitative protocol. The research found that experts develop intuitive judgments of quality, use multisensory environmental information to make judgments, and construct past and future narratives of streams using environmental characteristics. 2. Iterative design of the Ambient Holodeck multisensory system, and a study of how ambient sensory information impacts observation skills. The research found that multisensory information increased the number of observations participants made, and positively affected engagement and immersion. 3. Iterative design of the StreamBED VR training platform, and two studies; the former explores how qualitative assessment skills can be taught in VR, and the latter considers how training in VR, with and without Multisensory cues, compares to a PowerPoint (PPT) baseline. Study results found although VR participants were more excited to continue training than PPT participants, Standard VR and PPT participants scored closest to an expert gold standard, performing significantly better than Multisensory VR participants. This research concludes that VR has the potential to train qualitative assessment tasks, but qualifies that training design is multifaceted and complex, full of theoretical learning considerations and practical challenges. Further, VR realism can be a powerful tool for training, but is only effective when training cues clearly parallel assessment tasks