Digital twins from design to handover of constructed assets

A digital twin is a virtual representation of real-world assets and phenomena. It is a federated entity of synchronised data streams that give us situational awareness of what is happening and why it’s happening. The end-user can then determine what might be the results of the phenomena. Digital twins are sophisticated tools for educated decision-making. They are an emerging digital operations platform in which the end-user has the choice of which components are relevant for their digital twin experience and the decisions they are about to make based on the data and evidence provided through a digital twin. A digital twin is as good and as reliable as the data connected to it. The data components connected to the digital twin must be the actual digital replica of what they represent. Placeholders and ‘alike’ components have no use in digital twin because they make the situation misleading. A digital twin has several use-cases. It allows us to simulate and animate our physical environment’s technical and social performance based on real-time data. It enables us to analyse how our environment performs in daily operations and what are the short-term or long-term implications of that performance. A digital twin supports our design processes, construction operations, seamless handover, proactive maintenance, and predictive operations planning by visualising multiple data streams in a single system that can be interpreted by a human or decoded by a machine. Over time digital twins become a representation of different types of data and information, spanning disciplines and life cycle phases for our assets. As the world faces numerous challenges, a renewed approach to designing, constructing, and managing the built environment will be crucial, making the principles and concepts discussed in this paper even more relevant. The sector and the profession will be able to use digital twin systems to deliver constructed assets that are economically viable and socially and environmentally positive for current and future generations. RICS professionals are bound to play an ever-important role in developing, deploying, and using digital twins

Engineering Sketching: A Valuable Teaching Tool in Construction

Sketching in general engineering and science has been “outmanoeuvred” by computer graphics while still holding on in architectural engineering as a tool to think about spatial relationships, allowing the students to develop conceptual designs quicker than any CAD. Moreover, a recent paper reported that sketching helped students in geology develop critical thinking skills. Based on students’ feedback, it was concluded that it led to a deeper understanding of important concepts. Should it surprise us that psychological research shows that sketching facilitates inference, discovery and learning? This paper presents a model for creating and assessing assignments that uses engineering sketching to teach and learn in a second year course at UNSW, CVEN2101-Engineering Construction. The class focuses on studying key principles related to the safe and effective utilization of construction equipment such as trucks, excavators, cranes and temporary structures. Students faced the challenge to investigate how the physics and math relate to digging, lifting and the creation of large forces while keeping labourers safe. The concept of forensic engineering had to be used to study the cause of accidents. The developed model includes various measurements and proper motion paths, in an attempt to quantify the level of understanding. It is felt, that based on the findings of this study, that engineering sketching not only allows inventing new mechanisms, as Leonardo da Vinci did, but equally important, provides a valuable and reliable tool to teach and learn construction engineering

Technology adoption in construction.

Due to the complexity, high risk, and conservative character of the construction industry, many technologies do not become widely adopted. Even though vendors make determined efforts to overcome this and disseminate their technologies, the customers’ decision making processes for adopting construction technologies at the organisational level largely remain unknown. This thesis investigates the extremely complex issues related to the current practices of technology adoption in construction. It tests the hypothesis that construction companies follow a specific logical process linked to need, project objectives, characteristics of the adopting organisation, and the characteristics of the new technology to be adopted. The study explores how construction companies make the decision to uptake a new technology by focusing on customer and vendor activities, their interactions, contributing factors, and people involved in the process. Over a period of four years, seven technology exhibitions were visited to immerse the author in the customer-vendor market community and collect substantial first-hand data regarding the strategies of the vendors. This was coupled with conducting 147 semi-structured interviews spread across Australia and North America. The credibility of the results is increased by providing detailed descriptions of the process. Finally, key factors and individuals involved in the process were identified and ranked using the Analytical Hierarchy Process. The major original contributions of this thesis are the Construction Technology Adoption Framework (CTAF) and the recognition of the vendor dissemination strategy spectrum. CTAF is a framework that delineates the stages of the process that customer organisations use when deciding to adopt a new technology and the parallel vendor activities. It is extensively validated by thematic analysis of the interviews and factor analysis. The vendor dissemination strategy spectrum consists of five classes of patterns of vendor activities that relate to the technology type being sold and the size of the vendor. The thesis offers a framework covering the key factors that vary across this spectrum: Physical appearance, Interpersonal relationship, and Technology demonstration (PIT). It is extensively validated by both fuzzy and hard cluster analysis methods. The thesis also introduces the Downtime, Interpersonal relationship, and Technology operation quality (DIT) framework, and a study of the customer organisation factors relevant to technology adoption. The DIT framework delineates the implementation factors that are important in making new technology decisions. The customer organisation factors include the personnel roles in the organisation, the effect of organisational structure, and the effect of attitude to technology. These contributions are cross validated between customer and vendor responses and between Australia and North America. The significance of these contributions is that they enable vendors to understand how to match their dissemination strategies with customer expectations in each stage of the technology adoption process. It also provides a benchmark for new construction companies to use the current best practice in decision making. Understanding the CTAF decision framework also helps industry bodies and government organisations that seek to generally raise the use of new technology in the industry. The theoretical significance is that it unites the vendor perspective with the customer perspective and covers a wide range of construction technologies. The scope of the thesis is limited to technologies in the construction industry in developed nations. Future research is warranted to more clearly delineate any differences with developing nations or related industries

Mitigation of delay in industrial construction projects; case of Iran

Delays are one of the biggest problems construction firms face. It happens in most construction projects. Delays can lead to many negative effects such as lawsuits between owners and contractors, increased costs, loss of productivity and revenue, and contract termination. According to Bordoli and Baldwin (1998) and the World Bank (1990), for 1627 projects completed worldwide between 1974 and 1988, the overrun varied between 50% and 80%. In the United Arab Emirates, where construction contributes 14% to the gross domestic product, a study by Faridi and El-Sayegh (2006) revealed that 50% of construction projects encounter delays. In Iran many of constriction projects encounter delays also. This paper addresses two primary research questions as how do often happen delay in industrial construction projects? And how can a contractor mitigate of project delays? To achieve the above research questions, a case study approach will use in this research. The case study is selected in Iran. Data is collected through interviews and project documents

Life Cycle Assessment of Fly Ash and Cenospheres-based Geopolymer Materials

It was widely reported in the early 2000s that geopolymer technology exhibits superior mechanical properties and lower global warming potential (GWP) over the use of ordinary Portland cement (OPC). However, a major limitation observed in the sustainability evaluation is a lack of consideration of environmental impacts from the use of industrial waste. This observation led to the purpose of this study, which is to identify the key factors throughout geopolymer production that contribute to its sustainability performance. In this paper, two geopolymers made of fly ash (G-FA) and cenospheres (G-C) were examined by mechanical testing while their sustainability impacts on a cradle-to-grave approach were investigated. The industrial waste and transport modelling impacts were given special attention in the performed life-cycle assessment. After 28 days of curing, G-FA exhibited 64.56 MPa and 6.03 MPa of compressive strength and flexural strength, respectively. G-C, with ¾ of G-FA bulk density, achieved 19.09 MPa and 3.13 MPa, respectively, with no significant changes observed after 14 days of curing. By upscaling the inventories to 1 m3 of industrial production scale, geopolymers showed a GWP reduction up to 49.7% compared to OPC with natural aggregates and presented benefits on human health damage category by 23.7% (G-FA) to 41.6% (G-C). In conclusion, geopolymer mortars establish compressive strength and flexural strength that are adequate for construction applications and present sustainability benefits in GWP, which suggests them to be potential substitutions for OPC. However, the industrial waste treatment (i.e., preparation of fly ash) will deplete water bodies, and the sodium silicate induces significant environmental burdens during its manufacture, becoming the key factor to enhance the geopolymer’s sustainability

An Investigation of Virtual Reality Technology Adoption in the Construction Industry

While Virtual Reality (VR) technology has experienced a recent growth in interest and offers immense potential in a number of domains, there is still insufficient information on the acceptance and adoption of this technology among individual users. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the acceptance and adaptation of people using VR technology in the construction industry and to identify factors that prevent VR technology from being adopted more widely in the construction industry. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to approach this research problem among 15 students and academic staff members at two universities. The results of this research indicate that VR technology is acceptable to people who work in the construction industry. However, there are barriers to further adoption of VR technology, namely high VR hardware and software requirements, low affordability, and low accessibility. This research also proposes several resolutions to these barriers, including preparing facilities by construction industries and universities, providing software and hardware requirements for VR technologies, and decreasing the price of VR devices. The results of this research are of immense value to suppliers and companies affiliated with this technology. Further research is required to demonstrate the functionality of VR technology in the construction industry

Examining the impact of students’ attendance, sketching, visualization, and tutors experience on students’ performance: a case of building structures course in construction management

The aim of this paper is to examine students' performance in a computation-based course by evaluating the effects of key factors including sketching, visualization resources provided to them during the lectures, their attendance and tutors' experience. A systematic review was conducted including 192 articles published during January 2010 to December 2019. Further, a case study has been conducted in which 633 students from non-engineering backgrounds were taught a core course of construction over three-yearly sessions from 2017 to 2019. The performance has been assessed through two quizzes of 10% weight each, assignment of 40% weight and a final exam with 30% weight in 2017-18 and 40% weight in 2019 were utilized with an attendance criterion of below 75% as low attendance. The statistical result highlights that a clear difference of 14% overall marks exist between the students with less than 75% attendance and the ones with 75% and above in 2017 and a 10% gap in 2018. Students with high marks in sketching secured higher overall marks as compared to others highlighting that the sketching skill is useful to construction students. The findings contribute to the body of education knowledge by evaluating key influential factors and provide a useful benchmark to other educators in the field

Computational Workflow for Three-Dimension Printing in Construction: Digital Tools and Methodological Limitations

Three-dimensional printing in construction (3DPiC) is known as a trending technology in the construction industry. While scholars and practitioners seek to learn more about the applications of 3DPiC, there are no efficient workflows and open data sets available for further investigations. This paper intends to present the data produced in a laboratory for creating new models. The paper first presents the experimentation data collected from 60 models, and selected thermal digital images can be used for further sustainability analysis. The recorded data includes the time of crafting each layer of the model, the total time of creating a model and thermal measures. Based on the 60 experimentations and an intensive literature review, the paper presents a proposed computational workflow, including the use of Revit, Dynamo, Fusion 360, Navisworks and a selected 3D printer, which can be utilised for further data collection and analysis in the field. This model will assist in automating the cost estimation as an upgrade for 3DPiC. This paper is helpful for scholars and practitioners since it shows how laboratory data can be helpful for construction operation design

Effective Factors on Desirability of Private Open Spaces: A Case Study of Kuye Nasr Residential Buildings, Tehran

The gradual transformation of courtyard houses to apartments has contributed to the omission of certain spaces. The ill-matching of modern housing, with people’s lifestyles, has caused undesirable changes to their quality of life, health and well-being. Providing houses that suit individuals’ lifestyles plays an important role in the building social sustainability as well as economic and environmental aspects; this article will investigate, alongside, ways to improve private open areas in apartments. Two- to six-floor residential buildings in Kuye Nasr neighborhood were chosen to find factors that can improve the desirability of private open areas. First, a number of factors were collected by taking photos and conducting field studies. Next, several residents were randomly asked to share their opinions about such areas. Finally, a questionnaire examined the reliability of factors, which was then distributed to 100 residents. The final data was analyzed utilizing SPSS23. This study reveals that the functional aspect of a balcony is the most important item among semantic, perceptual, functional, physical, environmental, and beauty aspects. The following factors can contribute to residents’ satisfaction with balconies: dimensions; use of plants; connection with sky; peace and comfort; safety; function; and beauty. Findings additionally suggests the connection of balcony with kitchen