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

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

Big Data and Its Applications in Smart Real Estate and the Disaster Management Life Cycle: A Systematic Analysis

Big data is the concept of enormous amounts of data being generated daily in different fields due to the increased use of technology and internet sources. Despite the various advancements and the hopes of better understanding, big data management and analysis remain a challenge, calling for more rigorous and detailed research, as well as the identifications of methods and ways in which big data could be tackled and put to good use. The existing research lacks in discussing and evaluating the pertinent tools and technologies to analyze big data in an efficient manner which calls for a comprehensive and holistic analysis of the published articles to summarize the concept of big data and see field-specific applications. To address this gap and keep a recent focus, research articles published in last decade, belonging to top-tier and high-impact journals, were retrieved using the search engines of Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science that were narrowed down to a set of 139 relevant research articles. Different analyses were conducted on the retrieved papers including bibliometric analysis, keywords analysis, big data search trends, and authors’ names, countries, and affiliated institutes contributing the most to the field of big data. The comparative analyses show that, conceptually, big data lies at the intersection of the storage, statistics, technology, and research fields and emerged as an amalgam of these four fields with interlinked aspects such as data hosting and computing, data management, data refining, data patterns, and machine learning. The results further show that major characteristics of big data can be summarized using the seven Vs, which include variety, volume, variability, value, visualization, veracity, and velocity. Furthermore, the existing methods for big data analysis, their shortcomings, and the possible directions were also explored that could be taken for harnessing technology to ensure data analysis tools could be upgraded to be fast and efficient. The major challenges in handling big data include efficient storage, retrieval, analysis, and visualization of the large heterogeneous data, which can be tackled through authentication such as Kerberos and encrypted files, logging of attacks, secure communication through Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS), data imputation, building learning models, dividing computations into sub-tasks, checkpoint applications for recursive tasks, and using Solid State Drives (SDD) and Phase Change Material (PCM) for storage. In terms of frameworks for big data management, two frameworks exist including Hadoop and Apache Spark, which must be used simultaneously to capture the holistic essence of the data and make the analyses meaningful, swift, and speedy. Further field-specific applications of big data in two promising and integrated fields, i.e., smart real estate and disaster management, were investigated, and a framework for field-specific applications, as well as a merger of the two areas through big data, was highlighted. The proposed frameworks show that big data can tackle the ever-present issues of customer regrets related to poor quality of information or lack of information in smart real estate to increase the customer satisfaction using an intermediate organization that can process and keep a check on the data being provided to the customers by the sellers and real estate managers. Similarly, for disaster and its risk management, data from social media, drones, multimedia, and search engines can be used to tackle natural disasters such as floods, bushfires, and earthquakes, as well as plan emergency responses. In addition, a merger framework for smart real estate and disaster risk management show that big data generated from the smart real estate in the form of occupant data, facilities management, and building integration and maintenance can be shared with the disaster risk management and emergency response teams to help prevent, prepare, respond to, or recover from the disasters

The Effect of Place Attachment on Educational Efficiency in Elementary Schools

Close attention to education and its effects on the identities of societies has been ingrained in the history of studies. Nowadays, a considerable amount of criticism in the field of education is related to inefficient and obsolete educational scheduling, with a large number of researchers exploring new learning methods. Logically, these new methods require new architectural environments, which can meet the needs of a new generation with the approach of positively affecting students’ learning efficiency. The main purpose of this research is to identify effective factors in students’ sense of attachment to school. First, this research finds factors on the sense of attachment by studying past literature. Second, a number of questions and hypothesis are developed. Third, in order to validate the effective factors and answer the developed questions, a questionnaire is devised and distributed among 278 students of 10 state primary schools of Shahriyar, Iran. The collected data are then analyzed using SPSS software. The findings indicate that there is a meaningful relation between students’ educational efficiency and their sense of attachment to school. It also shows that important factors, such as social activities and connection with natural elements in design, can have a noticeable impact on the students’ sense of attachment to school and consequently their educational efficiency