Evaluation of the Suitability of Public-Private Partnership for Kowloon East Smart City Development Project in Hong Kong

Smart City has become increasingly popular around the world; Hong Kong is no exception. However, Hong Kong is currently lagging in smart city development, consequently, the government has launched a pilot project ‘Kowloon East Smart City Development’. However, due to fact that the implementation of smart solutions requires a high level of technical and managerial skills and Hong Kong’s public sector does not possess any experience in the smart city, therefore, this study investigated the suitability of public-private partnership (PPP) for the pilot project. Analytic Hierarchy Process is adopted to quantitatively assess the positive and negative impacts of PPP on the smart city project. The pairwise comparison was conducted by interviewing local experts experienced in both smart cities and PPPs. The local weighting of each positive and negative factor and likelihood measurement of alternatives were carried out. Subsequently, sensitivity analysis is administrated to identify the critical factor that can affect the final decision. The results indicated that the PPP is a suitable approach for the pilot project. ‘Greater benefit to the public’ is found to be the most critical factor

BIM Based Facility Condition Assessment

Current practices of using traditional methods of managing data using spreadsheets or hard paper copies for various building data, are commonly being used during building inspection and condition assessment. Building Information Modelling (BIM) can immensely help in solving problems of facility inspection by generating and managing digital representation of the physical and functional characteristics of a facility. This paper describes a model, which is developed to integrate the physical and environmental conditions of a facility on a BIM platform. In this study, factors influencing physical condition and environment condition of the building were identified. Building defects which causes physical deterioration of the building component reduces the ability to perform its intended designed function while environmental condition influences the comfort and health of occupants or users of the building. It is imperative to understand that physical and environment condition of the building are both of vital importance for safety, health and comfort of building users. Factors affecting physical and environment of building were used to develop proposed condition assessment model. Using this proposed model periodic general condition assessment can be performed and correspondingly deterioration graph can be generated for the facility over period of time. Based on inspection data and condition assessment models, building performance can be analyzed for future preventive maintenance

Rational Best-Value Model based on Expected Performance

The best-value procurement strategy is gaining the interest of federal and state agencies. The strategy increases the value added to a project for each dollar added. A new concept of best value, that is, a rational and flexible model based on expected performance, is presented. The model\u27s flexibility is obvious in the selection of parameters to be included in the contractor selection process and in the determination of their weights. The model\u27s rationality will be achieved through relating all awarded scores to the agency\u27s expected performance. The establishment of the best-value model relies on the past record of the contractor\u27s work for the agency as an indicator of qualification trend. This research incorporates prequalification as a first-level screening technique in selecting top contractor bids in the best-value procurement and then applies a rational scoring system in the final selection. Selection of the most appropriate contractor with the best qualifications for a given project will be based on contractor best value. Data are collected from groups of experts in the Minnesota Department of Transportation and processed through the analytic hierarchy process to establish the parameter weights. Although this research assists departments of transportation in selecting the best contractor, the results are relevant to both academics and practitioners. The paper provides practitioners with a tool for ranking contractors based on best value and provides academics with selection parameters, a model to evaluate the best value, and a methodology for quantifying the qualitative effect of subjective factors

Steel Bridge Protection Policy: Main Report

The study identifies various painting systems that are successfully used in Indiana’s surrounding states and other industries. The identified systems are further screened and evaluated. After prudently comparing INDOT’s inorganic zinc / vinyl system with the waterborne acrylic system, the moisture cure urethane coating system, and the 3-coat system of zinc-epoxy-urethane, the results show that the new 3-coat system fulfills INDOT’s needs with the most benefits. Therefore, the 3-coat system is recommended to replace INDOT present inorganic zinc / vinyl system. To deal with the problems facing the lead-based paint, a comparison between full-removal and over-coating alternatives is made. Results show that over-coating might provide a good protection for less than half the cost of full-removal; however it delays the lead full-removal process and does not completely solve the environmental problem. The metalization of steel bridges is seemingly a potential protection policy. After reviewing standards and specifications on metalization, it is shown that metalization jobs require a higher degree of control. It suits on-shop practices, however, the initial cost is considerably high. This study also describes a life cycle cost analysis that was done to determine an optimal painting system for INDOT. Herein, a deterministic method of economic analysis and a stochastic method of Markov chains process are used. The analysis not only reconfirms that the 3-coat system is the comparatively better painting system, but also generates an optimal painting maintenance plan for INDOT. To assure the quality of paint material and workmanship after substantial completion of the painting contract, the development of legally binding and dependable warranty clauses is initiated in this study. The developed painting warranty clauses were primarily derived from the painting warranty clauses used by IDOT, MDOT, and INDOT’s pavement warranty clauses. A comparative study was conducted on eleven essential categories. Among them, it was found that the warranty period, the definition of “defect”, and the amount of the warranty bond all need further evaluation

Steel Bridge Protection Policy: Evaluation of Bridge Coating system for INDOT Steel Bridges

The study identifies various painting systems that are successfully used in Indiana’s surrounding states and other industries. The identified systems are further screened and evaluated. After prudently comparing INDOT’s inorganic zinc / vinyl system with the waterborne acrylic system, the moisture cure urethane coating system, and the 3-coat system of zinc-epoxy-urethane, the results show that the new 3-coat system fulfills INDOT’s needs with the most benefits. Therefore, the 3-coat system is recommended to replace INDOT present inorganic zinc / vinyl system. To deal with the problems facing the lead-based paint, a comparison between full-removal and over-coating alternatives is made. Results show that over-coating might provide a good protection for less than half the cost of full-removal; however it delays the lead full-removal process and does not completely solve the environmental problem. The metalization of steel bridges is seemingly a potential protection policy. After reviewing standards and specifications on metalization, it is shown that metalization jobs require a higher degree of control. It suits on-shop practices, however, the initial cost is considerably high. This study also describes a life cycle cost analysis that was done to determine an optimal painting system for INDOT. Herein, a deterministic method of economic analysis and a stochastic method of Markov chains process are used. The analysis not only reconfirms that the 3-coat system is the comparatively better painting system, but also generates an optimal painting maintenance plan for INDOT. To assure the quality of paint material and workmanship after substantial completion of the painting contract, the development of legally binding and dependable warranty clauses is initiated in this study. The developed painting warranty clauses were primarily derived from the painting warranty clauses used by IDOT, MDOT, and INDOT’s pavement warranty clauses. A comparative study was conducted on eleven essential categories. Among them, it was found that the warranty period, the definition of “defect”, and the amount of the warranty bond all need further evaluation

Steel Bridge Protection Policy: Life Cycle Cost Analysis and Maintenance Plan

The study identifies various painting systems that are successfully used in Indiana\u27s surrounding states and other industries. the identified systems are further screened and evaluated. After prudently comparing INDOT\u27s inorgainc zinc/vinyl system with the waterborne acrylic system, the moisture cure urethane coating system and the 3-coat system of zinc-epoxy-urethane, the sresults show that thte new 3-coat system fulfills INDOT\u27s needs with the most benefits. Therefore, the 3-coat system is recommended to replace INDOT present inorgaic zinc/vinyl system. To deal with the problems facing the lead-based paint, a comparison between full-removal and over-coating alternatives is made. Results show that over-coating might provide a good protection for less than half the cost of full-removal; however it delays the lead full-removal process and does not completely solve the environmental problem. The metalization of steel bridges is seemingly a potential protection policy. After reviewing standards and specifications on metalizzation, it is shown that metalizzation jobs require a higher degree of control. It suits on-shop practices, however, the initial cost is considerably high. This study also describes a life cycle cost analysis that was done to determine an optimal painting system for INDOT. Herein, a deterministic method of economic analysis and a stochastic method of Markov chains process are used. The analysis not only reconfirms that the 3-coat system is the comparatively better painting system, but also generates an optimal painting maintenance plan for INDOT. To assure the quality of paint materials and workmanship after substania

Cost benefit analysis for failure of sewer pipelines

Sewer pipelines failure in sewage networks can have adverse potential impacts on socio-economic aspects in any community. Due to the fact that it's difficult to capture the relationship between the physical and economical aspects as a result of critical sewer pipelines failure, economic concepts are used to evaluate the economic loss as a result of these failures. In this paper an analysis for the costs resulting from sewer pipelines failure and the benefits achieved from avoiding failures are presented. The costs included in the cost benefit analysis are the direct costs used to reinstate failed pipelines and the indirect costs, borne by the society and economy. In the benefits analysis, only the tangible and measurable benefits limited to the health sector and preventing diseases are addressed in this paper. It is expected that the proposed approach could help in estimating the economic losses due to sewer pipelines failure especially for the intangible factors that are difficult to measure. In addition it could help decision makers in taking necessary measures to preserve critical assets that could have adverse potential impacts on valuable natural resources such as surface and groundwater and soil surrounding failed pipelines.This publication was made possible by NPRP grant # (NPRP6-357-2-150) from the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of The Qatar Foundation). The statements made herein are solely the responsibility of the authors. Also the authors would like to thank the public works authority of Qatar (ASHGAL) for their support in the data collection.Scopu

Watermain Breaks in Hong Kong: Causes and Consequences

Watermain failure is a complex problem associated with significant socio-economic and environmental impacts. The complexity of this problem originates from many factors of physical, operational, and environmental nature. These aspects have varying contribution towards watermain breaks depending on the regional context. This, therefore, requires specialized studies for each individual region. This study aims at adopting the text mining approach to investigate the aspects contributing to the failure of watermains in Hong Kong (HK) and the socio-economic and environmental consequences of these failures. In this regard, a sum of 94 media articles discussing HK-based watermain failures from 1984 onwards are studied. The findings showed that the aging pipes, hilly terrain, ground settlement, excavation works, and high-water pressure, are the most repeated failure causes in the media. The watermain bursts in HK are found to result in traffic disruptions and incidents, loss of water supply, loss of business activity, flooding inside buildings, cave-in incidents, etc. The inquiry has resulted in a network of interrelationships among consequences of main breaks indicating that these breaks are complex occurrences where chains of events lead to significant socio-economic and environmental impacts. This demonstrates the need of resilient Water Distribution Network (WDN) in HK and also the need of rigorous risk management to deal with the threats related to main failures. The causes behind breaks identified in this study can lead to the modelling of HK-based WDN helping forecast the occurrence of such events. The consequences of breaks identified in this study can help formulate risk management frameworks for HK-WDN

Collective thinking approach for improving leak detection systems

Water mains, especially old pipelines, are consistently threatened by the formation of leaks. Leaks inherit increased direct and indirect costs and impacts on various levels such as the economic field and the environmental level. Recently, financially capable municipalities are testing acoustic early detection systems that utilize wireless noise loggers. Noise loggers would be distributed throughout the water network to detect any anomalies in the network. Loggers provide early detection via recording and analyzing acoustic signals within the network. The city of Montreal adopted one of the leak detection projects in this domain and had reported that the main issue that hinders the installed system is false alarms. False alarms consume municipality resources and funds inefficiently. Therefore, this paper aims to present a novel approach to utilize more than one data analysis and classification technique to ameliorate the leak identification process. In this research, acoustic leak signals were analyzed using Fourier Transform, and the multiple frequency bandwidths were determined.Three models were developed to identify the state of the leak using Naïve Bayes (NB), Deep Learning (DL), and Decision Tree (DT) Algorithms. Each of the developed models has an accuracy ranging between 84% to 89%. An aggregator approach was developed to cultivate the collective approaches developed into one single answer. Through aggregation, the accuracy of leak detection improved from 89% at its best to 100%.The design, implementation approach and results are displayed in this paper. Using this method helps municipalities minimize and alleviate the costs of uncertain leak verifications and efficiently allocate their resource

Generative AI in the Construction Industry: A State-of-the-art Analysis

The construction industry is a vital sector of the global economy, but it faces many productivity challenges in various processes, such as design, planning, procurement, inspection, and maintenance. Generative artificial intelligence (AI), which can create novel and realistic data or content, such as text, image, video, or code, based on some input or prior knowledge, offers innovative and disruptive solutions to address these challenges. However, there is a gap in the literature on the current state, opportunities, and challenges of generative AI in the construction industry. This study aims to fill this gap by providing a state-of-the-art analysis of generative AI in construction, with three objectives: (1) to review and categorize the existing and emerging generative AI opportunities and challenges in the construction industry; (2) to propose a framework for construction firms to build customized generative AI solutions using their own data, comprising steps such as data collection, dataset curation, training custom large language model (LLM), model evaluation, and deployment; and (3) to demonstrate the framework via a case study of developing a generative model for querying contract documents. The results show that retrieval augmented generation (RAG) improves the baseline LLM by 5.2, 9.4, and 4.8% in terms of quality, relevance, and reproducibility. This study provides academics and construction professionals with a comprehensive analysis and practical framework to guide the adoption of generative AI techniques to enhance productivity, quality, safety, and sustainability across the construction industry.Comment: 74 pages, 11 figures, 20 table