The role of public gardens in enhancing diabetic patients’ health and wellbeing

Cities in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) have experienced rapid uncontrolled urbanism due to the absence of robust planning measures. This causes lack or ill distributions of facilities and segregation between these facilities and the residences in districts and neighbourhoods across the King-dom. It also encouraged citizens to adopt unhealthy lifestyles which in turn aggravated their health conditions. This paper discusses the critical relationship between the unhealthy lifestyle of diabetic patients and the proximity of public gardens. A survey on 76 diabetic patients and their living conditions was carried out. A visual and mapping survey was conducted on public gardens and vacant lands around diabetics’ homes. The study found that cities in the Eastern province, KSA have unhealthy urban and suburban settings in terms of the proximity and characteristics of public gardens. It is revealed that patients have unhealthier lifestyle and frequent diabetic symptoms when gardens are far away and vacant lands are nearer to their homes. This calls the need for emergent amendment of the present planning regulations for the use of vacant lands and public amenities including public gardens in Saudi cities so they would help improving the physical, psychological and spiritual health of the diabetic patients and the community

IP12 Advanced logistics for end-to-end collaboration and coordination

Infrastructure and construction projects are increasingly adopting off-site construction, and are becoming more competitive and collaborative, making well-timed delivery of off-site components/volumes essential. Logistics for off-site construction and infrastructure is a complex activity, requiring careful planning and organisation to ensure that prefabricated and preassembled components arrive on time at construction sites. Improved logistics will help the industry to improve its performance and reputation, as well as increase its profit margins. The TIES Living Lab Programme is promoting the use of modern methods of construction (MMC) particularly the off-site manufacture of constructed assets – and a key challenge of that approach is to ensure delivery to site of the manufactured components. Under the Programme, University of the West of England (UWE) Bristol was tasked with building and testing a suitable cloud-based advanced logistics platform for off-site construction projects. This paper presents an overview of the Advanced Logistics Demonstrator Project and the state-of-the-art integrated asset management platform developed under the project on Advanced Logistics

IP5a standardisation and classification of project cost data

Benchmarking is a fundamental tool for improving performance in the delivery of transport infrastructure projects. The sector has seen a significant boost in funding in recent years, and there is an urgent need to use benchmarking to inform decision-making processes so that projects benefit from collaboration and deliver future-proof infrastructure while ensuring value for money. But benchmarking cannot take place without suitable standardised data – particularly data for assessing all aspects of project costs. Unfortunately, as the TIES Living Lab data research team (the Analytical Consortium) acknowledged from the outset, there is a lack of consistency in the way costs are reported across the construction supply chain and client organisations, making it very difficult to implement robust comparison within organisations, or more widely across the sector and internationally. This paper describes a project to demonstrate the possibilities of using artificial intelligence (AI) to extract, transform and classify project cost data in a standardised way using “data mining”. The objective of the work, carried out under the project on Artificial Intelligence for Data Mining (and feeding in to the project on Metrics, Benchmarking & Repository) was to prove the concept in a “live” situation, taking data from a variety of sources and showing how AI can classify infrastructure project cost data into a common standard

Towards an automated photogrammetry-based approach for monitoring and controlling construction site activities

© 2018 Elsevier B.V. The construction industry has a poor productivity record, which was predominantly ascribed to inadequate monitoring of how a project is progressing at any given time. Most available approaches do not offer key stakeholders a shared understanding of project performance in real-time, which as a result fail to identify any project slippage on the original schedule. This paper reports on the development of a novel automatic system for monitoring, updating and controlling construction site activities in real-time. The proposed system seeks to harness advances in close-range photogrammetry to deliver an original approach that is capable of continuous monitoring of construction activities, with progress status determined, at any given time, throughout the construction lifecycle. The proposed approach has the potential to identify any deviation of as planned construction schedules, so prompt action can be taken because of an automatic notification system, which informs decision-makers via emails and SMS. This system was rigorously tested in a real-life case study of an in-progress construction site. The findings revealed that the proposed system achieved a significant high level of accuracy and automation, and was relatively cheap and easier to operate

The comparison study between UK daylighting simulation-Malaysia daylighting simulations due to overcast sky conditions

Due to the growing demand for building energy simulation in buildings, lot of work has been done in research since last 50 years but still a huge area needs to be covered. The current state of research, which is moving towards building energy simulation is driven by the ongoing development. The ability to analyze energy requirements accurately in new buildings at various design stages can help clients achieve optimization and meet the requirements laid down by local energy legislation. Further increase in the demand for building energy performance simulation is too completed as new policies and regulations are coming up, such as the European Union (EU) directive on building energy performance. With increasing concern in this field, architects and building designers are demanding more simulation and validation to be performed on buildings prior to construction, so as to better understand the building design and energy performance relationships. This compassion study presented the sky conditions which are varying every single second. Therefore to analyze the performance of daylighting, its effectiveness that affected into work places in two different locations in UK and Malaysia

Critical BIM qualification criteria for construction pre-qualification and selection

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Despite emerging research on Building Information Modelling (BIM) capability, there remain no studies that specifically look at criteria for the pre-qualification and selection of construction supply chain (CSC) firms for BIM projects. As a consequence, there is insufficient theoretical insight and empirical justification for critical BIM qualification criteria for the CSC context. In order to bridge this knowledge gap, a study was conducted to ascertain the most critical BIM capability attributes, as well as relevance to the pre-qualification and selection of suitable CSC firms for BIM-enabled projects. The relative importance of these criteria was determined based on their perceived influence on overall BIM delivery success on recent BIM-enabled projects. A sequential exploratory mixed methodological research design was adopted involving semi-structured interviews (n = 8) and a Delphi survey (n = 25) of experts, as well as a survey of CSC firms (n = 64) on BIM-enabled projects. The findings reinforce the criticality of past BIM experience in delivery success. Furthermore, it revealed that while technological infrastructure-related capacities (such as software and hardware availability) are perceived as very important qualification criteria, their actual contribution to delivery success is not as high in comparison to criteria related to previous BIM experience. This study provides insights on prioritising BIM capability criteria based on evidence on their contribution to delivery success in practice rather than their perceived importance as capability metrics

Categorisation of requirements in the ontology-based framework for employer information requirements (OntEIR)

Employer Information Requirements (EIR) are the keystone for developing a successful Building Information Modelling (BIM) project. However, clients’ lack of skill and experience in categorising and defining these requirements often undermines the performance of a construction project and, ultimately, the ability of the finished product to meet their needs. By definition, EIR shortcomings include incomplete and inconsistent requirements and specifications, and whilst some work has been performed to try to address these, this area is still underdeveloped. This paper reports on the development of a transformative approach to the categorisation of requirements in a meaningful way, enabling effective filtering so that stakeholders can access just the information they need for the task at hand. The Ontology-based framework for Employer Information Requirements (OntEIR) seeks to provide a step change in categorisation by identifying ‘static’ and ‘dynamic’ requirements, including related types and sub-types. OntEIR has been rigorously validated by a group of BIM experts, and the results have revealed that this approach to categorisation significantly improved the elicitation and understanding of requirements

Disaggregating high-resolution gas metering data using pattern recognition

© 2018 Elsevier B.V. Growing concern about the scale and extent of the gap between predicted and actual energy performance of new and retrofitted UK homes has led to a surge in the development of new tools and technologies trying to address the problem. A vital aspect of this work is to improve ease and accuracy of measuring in-use performance to better understand the extent of the gap and diagnose its causes. Existing approaches range from low cost but basic assessments allowing very limited diagnosis, to intensively instrumented experiments that provide detail but are expensive and highly disruptive, typically requiring the installation of specialist monitoring equipment and often vacating the house for several days. A key challenge in reducing the cost and difficulty of complex methods in occupied houses is to disaggregate space heating energy from that used for other uses without installing specialist monitoring equipment. This paper presents a low cost, non-invasive approach for doing so for a typical occupied UK home where space heating, hot water and cooking are provided by gas. The method, using dynamic pattern matching of total gas consumption measurements, typical of those provided by a smart meter, was tested by applying it to two occupied houses in the UK. The findings revealed that this method was successful in detecting heating patterns in the data and filtering out coinciding use

A dynamic approach for evacuees’ distribution and optimal routing in hazardous environments

© 2018 Elsevier B.V. In a complex built environment, the situation changes rapidly during an emergency event. Typically, available systems rely heavily on a static scenario in the calculation of safest routes for evacuation. In addition, egress route calculation and evacuation simulations are performed separately from path-finding for rescue teams. In this paper, we propose a state-of-the-art dynamic approach, which deals not only with a 3D environment, shape of spaces and hazard locations, but also with the dynamic distribution of occupants during evacuation. A database of densities and information about hazard influence are generated and used to calculate optimal paths for rescue teams. Three simulation scenarios were rigorously compared in this study, namely static with constant density values determined for subsequent stages of evacuation, semi-dynamic with densities representing an actual people distribution in a building during evacuation simulation, and dynamic with temporal distribution of evacuees stored in a database, and dynamically used in optimal path calculations. The findings revealed that static simulation is significantly different from semi-dynamic and dynamic simulations, and each type of simulation is better suited for the decision task at hand. These results have significant implications on achieving a rapid and safe evacuation of people during an emergency event

New tool will help civil engineers meet CDM requirements to design for safety

© ICE Publishing. All rights reserved. A new tool is being developed to help civil engineers and other construction professionals improve their capability to design for safety under the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations. Patrick Manu and Lamine Mahdjoubi of the University of the West of England, Alistair Gibb of Loughborough University and Michael Behm of East Carolina University report