Towards BIM-Enhanced Renovation Management Tools with Support to Stakeholder Interaction

This paper presents two renovation management tools that are currently being developed in BIM4EEB project: BIMPlanner—a planning and management tool for housing renovation projects —and BIM4Occupants—a coordination tool between contractors and occupants. An information sharing layer, based on ontologies and linked data technologies, is an essential technical enabler of these tools. The layer allows data sharing across the different components of the toolkit. The tools aim to enhance information sharing between renovation stakeholders and to enrich BIM data with links to other relevant data in renovation projects

Mobile crowdsensing of parking space using geofencing and activity recognition

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An object-based conceptual model for ICT-based situational awareness of the construction process

Due to the dynamic nature of the construction process, situational awareness (SA)is essential for the stakeholders to perceive, understand and project the real situation of the construction process to support their decision making. SA requires a collection, integration, and interpretation of information to reveal the occurrence of the real-world elements and environment. Nowadays, with the emerging ICT implementations in the construction domain, the volume, content, and quality of data and information that enables situational awareness for the construction process have increased. This provides the potential of establishing an ICT-based SA system for the construction process. However, SA information of construction process has been collected with point solutions so far, which does not allow true SA considering multiple information streams together. In order to integrate the information via multiple ICT systems to support the establishment of ICT-based SA system for the construction process, this paper presents an object-based conceptual model. This model offers an initiative of conceptualizing the objects in the construction process and intend to be a reference for integrating the information from various ICT systems.Peer reviewe

A shared ontology suite for digital construction workflow

Funding Information: This research was partly supported by the DiCtion (Digitalizing Construction Workflows) project, which was funded by Business Finland and a consortium of six industrial partners (until 2020). It was also partly funded by the BIM4EEB project that has received funding from European Union's H2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement N. 820660 (from 2019-). Financial support was also provided by the Building 2030 consortium of 21 Finnish companies (from 2020-). The content of this publication reflects the authors' view only, and Business Finland, the European Commission or the Building 2030 consortium are not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. The authors are grateful for the study's financial and technical support. Publisher Copyright: © 2021 The AuthorsWith ongoing advancements in information and communication technologies (ICTs) in all stages of the construction lifecycle, information from entities related to construction workflow (CW) can now be automatically collected. These implementations are point solutions, which require systematic integration to combine their information to enable a holistic picture of CW. The major barrier to such integration is information heterogeneity, where the information is collected from different systems under multiple contexts. Scholars in the construction domain have explored the use of ontology to solve the information-integration problem, although an ontology that both adequately represents the CW and integrates the digitalized information of CW via various systems and multiple contexts is currently missing from the existing literature. This research thus presents an ontology set for formalizing and integrating CW information within the digital construction context. The proposed digital construction ontologies (DiCon) are shared representations of construction domain knowledge that specify the terms and relations of CWs and their related information. We developed the DiCon based on a hybrid ontology development approach. The DiCon includes six modules: Entities, Processes, Information, Agents, Variables, and Contexts. The developed DiCon was further evaluated by approaches including automatic consistency checking, criteria-based evaluation, expert workshops, and task-based evaluation and involved two use cases by answering relevant competency questions via SPARQL queries. The results of the evaluation demonstrate that the DiCon ontologies are sufficient to represent domain knowledge and can formalize and integrate CW information within the digital construction context.Peer reviewe

A Shared Ontology for Logistics Information Management in the Construction Industry

Logistics management plays an essential role in supporting the primary activities in manufacturing industries. Similarly, in the construction industry, logistics operations are a crucial part that directly influence the construction operations. Construction operations management requires various stakeholders to collaborate through effective communication and prompt information sharing. However, logistics management in construction is often challenged by insufficient information management, lack of formalized information standards and poor information interoperability among heterogeneous systems. Semantic Web technologies advance information management support and improve information interoperability. In this research, we present a domain-level ontology as a common information reference for standardizing and integrating construction logistics information, and finally to improve the efficiency and transparency of logistics information management. The proposed ontology provides information interoperability between logistics management and construction workflow management. The ontology was evaluated by automatic consistency checking and answering the competency questions (CQs) via SPARQL queries. Furthermore, we used actual schedule and material delivery data of a construction project to evaluate the proposed ontology to see if it could support the material kitting logistics practice. We provide a valid ontology that is able support the logistics information management for the construction. The research is limited to providing a single example application of the ontology. Future research should focus on extending the ontology for different specific solutions to yield standardized information management for construction operations.Peer reviewe