AN AUTOMATED FRAMEWORK FOR ENSURING INFORMATION CONSISTENCY IN PRICE LIST TENDERING DOCUMENT

Effective cost estimation for tendering plays a critical role in the building construction process, enabling efficient investment management and ensuring successful execution of the construction phase. Traditional cost estimation procedure involves manual information processing to extract and match technical data from textual description construction resources. This activity requires practitioner deep experience and manual effort, often resulting in errors and, in the worst scenario, judicial disputes. In response to the increasing demand for structured information and automated processes, this study addresses the need for Public Administrations to achieve better control over the data contained in public tendering documents provided to practitioners. To fulfill this objective, a framework is proposed to automatically retrieve information from these documents, serving as a support tool to map items within the documents, highlight missing data, and critical semantic ambiguity. The designed framework aims to develop a tool for automatically identifying similarities between work items and their corresponding elementary resource items in Price List tendering documents. By leveraging the information retrieval NLP technique of cosine similarity through TF-IDF, a methodology was developed to support and facilitate practitioners' activities. Finally, the framework was tested on four case studies extracted from Lombardy Regional Italian price list documents showing that the resulting support tool is able to automate the analysis process and efficiently reveal inconsistency. The model successfully extracted and correctly matched the elementary resource to the corresponding work query in 75% of the cases where the elementary resource was present in the list. Additionally, the model proved to be a valuable tool in helping practitioners identify missing resources

Adaptive-predictive control strategy for HVAC systems in smart buildings – A review

High share of energy consumption in buildings and subsequent increase in greenhouse gas emissions along with stricter legislations have motivated researchers to look for sustainable solutions in order to reduce energy consumption by using alternative renewable energy resources and improving the efficiency in this sector. Today, the smart building and socially resilient city concepts have been introduced where building automation technologies are implemented to manage and control the energy generation/consumption/storage. Building automation and control systems can be roughly classified into traditional and advanced control strategies. Traditional strategies are not a viable choice for more sophisticated features required in smart buildings. The main focus of this paper is to review advanced control strategies and their impact on buildings and technical systems with respect to energy/cost saving. These strategies should be predictive/responsive/adaptive against weather, user, grid and thermal mass. In this context, special attention is paid to model predictive control and adaptive control strategies. Although model predictive control is the most common type used in buildings, it is not well suited for systems consisting of uncertainties and unpredictable data. Thus, adaptive predictive control strategies are being developed to address these shortcomings. Despite great progress in this field, the quantified results of these strategies reported in literature showed a high level of inconsistency. This is due to the application of different control modes, various boundary conditions, hypotheses, fields of application, and type of energy consumption in different studies. Thus, this review assesses the implementations and configurations of advanced control solutions and highlights research gaps in this field that need further investigations

How to invest in the “Market of Sustainability”: Evaluating the impacts of a Real Estate investment across ESG criteria|Investire nel “Mercato sostenibile”: Valutare gli impatti di un investimento immobiliare attraverso i criteri ESG

This article is based on recent research and debates on the development and investment models of the Real Estate sector encouraged by the new policies and action programs of the European Union, and primarily the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals-SDGs of the 2030 Agenda. In particular, the research emphasizes evaluating the effects of Italian Residential Real Estate investments on the three dimensions of sustainability conceptualized through the ESG - Environmental Social Governance criteria. In this context, the authors experiment with identifying a set of indicators according to ESG criteria helpful in describing the incidence of activities in Real Estate processes (along the entire life cycle of the asset) and, therefore, to guide residential market investors in choices with a high sustainable impact. The methodology of this work has firstly identified the European and Italian regulatory framework relating to the ESG sphere by studying the indicators already in use or developed for measuring sustainable performance particularly for real estate sector, like gaps in literature about proper methodologies to measure performance while involving process’ actors. Then, the proposed participatory methodology has been built by taking as reference a real case study - reuse of a building complex in the city of Milan for residential purposes- to identify with a panel of experts and involved actors the phases and sub-phases listed as work-breakdown structure, which may be subject to performance and impact measurement. Furthermore, ESG impacts in terms of beneficiaries from the project and key performance indicators has been assessed and ranked, resulting in an economic and social sustainability criteria priority in involved actors’ sake. Therefore, this research work provides the foundations for a replicable evaluation system for measuring sustainability standards in the residential Real Estate market considering innovatively co-participative decision-making processes along the project life-cycle. However, the methodology can be reinforced in the future with sensitivity methods on involved actors’ primary choices in the multi-criteria process and the enlargement of Panel experts’ profiles or, even, addressed to other targets more than the residential one