Virtual Reality And The Future Of Construction

Introduction: Despite the recent trends in technology, construction projects are becoming increasingly challenging, which, in the result, brings in more complex and dynamic construction environments. In fact, traditional management and monitoring methods are currently unable to keep up with the industry's quick development, leading to several problems in task efficiency and transfer of information between stakeholders. As a result, the Architecture Engineering Construction and Operations (AECO) sector is making use of the digitalization in order to improve project management, assist trade-crews and achieve a more proficient working environment. The adoption of Building Information Modelling (BIM) embodies a paradigm shift from the traditional approaches towards a collaborative and integrated working process. Though BIM is improving the aforesaid issues, not every construction entity can easily adapt and use it successfully. Therefore, supportive tools to assist BIM in achieving its full potential are in high demand. Objectives: The current research objective is to provide a review of previous works in the field of BIM-based Virtual Reality (VR), in order to establish a clear view of this research field. This work provides the primary data on such goals. Methodology: In order to conduct the research, the PRISMA Statement strategy was used. The selected primary keywords were "construction", "virtual reality" and "building information modelling" and their variants. The research was carried out in the main engineering databases and journals, being Scopus, Science Direct and IEEE Xplore some examples. Results: After the identification of 2,950 records, exclusion criteria were applied: year of publication, type of document, type of source and deduplication. The titles and abstracts of the publications were screened in order to determine the scope of the papers, leaving for full-text analysis just 75 studies. After going through the eligibility criteria, only 14 papers remained. Using the snowballing technique, two more papers were added to the study, resulting in 16 included papers. Most of the papers focused on the Construction Design, Construction Management, and Construction Safety fields, being "design" the most occurring construction stage. The highlighted target groups for the VR interfaces were Engineers, Architects and Workers. Most system architectures comprise, at least, three layers regarding a BIM software tool, a visual enhancement module and a game engine to provide the virtual environment and interaction functionalities. However, some studies referred to a fourth layer (database). Conclusions: The BIM-VR relation addressed in the articles was mainly focused on the model's geometric information since BIM provides an accurate display of building geometry. Most VR interfaces do not possess a database component to provide access to BIM parametric information, leading to the conclusion that BIM is not achieving its full potential with VR tools

Técnicas de Levantamento laser scanner - aplicabilidade ao contexto dos edifícios

Apesar dos recentes avanços tecnológicos na eficiência energética da construção nova, para que os objetivos internacionais da indústria da Construção sejam atingidos, a reabilitação do stock existente deve ser considerada, apresentando-se, aliás, como uma das soluções mais eficazes. Assim, com a progressiva necessidade de uma aquisição expedita e eficiente de dados geométricos in-situ, as técnicas de laser scanning têm vindo a crescer em importância e prática dentro da indústria da Construção. Este artigo pretende expandir o conhecimento sobre estas técnicas, executando para isso múltiplos ensaios práticos seguidos da sua análise. As conclusões retiradas destes ensaios são depois postas em prática através do levantamento laser scanner do Laboratório de Construções da Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto. É ainda possível demonstrar possíveis ligações entre o laser scanning e o Building Information Modelling, apontando vários benefícios e futuros usos desta ligação

Portuguese public procurement data for construction (2015–2022)

The Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) sector currently exhibits a significant scarcity of systematised information in databases (DB). This characteristic is a relevant obstacle to implementing new methodologies in the sector, which have proven highly successful in other industries. In addition, this scarcity also contrasts with the intrinsic workflow of the AEC sector, which generates a high volume of documentation throughout the construction process.To help solve this issue, the present work focuses on the systematisation of the data related to the contracting and public tendering procedure in Portugal, summarising the steps to obtain and process this information through the use of scraping algorithms, as well as the subsequential translation of the gathered data into English. The contracting and public tendering procedure is one of the most well-documented procedures at the national level, having all its data available as open-access. The resulting DB comprises 5214 unique contracts, characterised by 37 distinct properties.This paper identifies future development opportunities that can be supported by this DB, such as the application of descriptive statistical analysis techniques and/or Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms, namely, Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), to improve construction tendering

Relatório de estágio [na GECI INTERNACIONAL] para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Industrial Ramo de Engenharia Mecânica

O presente relatório é referente ao estágio profissional realizado na empresa GECI INTERNACIONAL, descrevendo o trabalho efectuado durante o estágio profissional que teve uma duração de sete meses e meio. A informação, nele contida, é de natureza prática e objectiva. O trabalho desenvolvido ao longo deste estágio teve como alvo uma aeronave bimotora “Skylander SK105”. Toda a informação descrita é referente ao trabalho desenvolvido/realizado no projecto da aeronave em conjunto com as equipas da GECI SYSTEMS e Sky Aircraft, fazendo dele parte todo o trabalho de design e de cálculo realizado para os componentes alvo de estudo e também todas as alterações propostas aos projectos iniciais assim como a justificação dessas opções. O desenvolvimento dos objectivos ao longo do relatório está dividido em capítulos, nestes estão: os tópicos definindo assim as várias fases ou alterações que foram propostas para cada componente. Como se constatará ao longo deste relatório, esta experiência foi bastante enriquecedora, quer do ponto de vista profissional quer pessoal