Semi-Automation of Practice Conformance Measurement
Measuring conformance of construction management practices against policies, guidelines, or specifications is typically performed manually by professionals as a part of an operational (internal) audit. Thorough operational audits are known to increase the performance of a company/project; however, this process takes considerable time as several professionals are required to go through thousands of pages of documents, complex workflows, and personal interviews. This research aimed to explore and evaluate specific methods and toolsets that may assist in the semi-automation of conformance measurement. Using principles and toolsets from Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Process Mining, document and workflow conformance measurements were achieved in semi-automated ways. Semi-automation showed strength in terms of time and accuracy with larger data sets.
Details » J.1 C.4 T.1
Process Mining/Data Analytics
Processes are considered vital in the construction industry. Construction project participants need to follow the processes in a suitable manner and at the right time. Nowadays, most companies desire to document electronic records for future reference. This is especially true when a workflow is implemented on a project, and an event log (i.e., a collection of sequentially recorded events) is created and saved automatically in the database. The purpose of process mining is to analyze, diagnose, and improve processes. With the event log data, process mining toolsets can automatically create a workflow by process discovery function. The discovered workflow results gained from the process mining toolsets enable an analysis of the business process/workflow implementation. This research introduced process mining to the construction management domain and validated how the process mining concepts and toolsets can be applied to capital projects with real data. Compared to the manual method, the assistance of a process mining toolset reduced time for process analysis (e.g., conformance measurement).
Details » C.1 C.4
The Development of Semi-Automated Capital Project Practice Conformance Measurement Framework
Benchmarking and metrics (BM&M) programs aim to measure and assess capital project performance and to find best practices among similar projects. The benefit of the data collection approach is that significantly more data is available than what can otherwise be afforded in a site-visit approach. However, responses are self-reported; therefore, BM&M programs are subject to some level of interpretation and might be less credible than the results of site visits to each project and company. Additionally, the data is manually recorded, which increases the risk of human errors. This research focused on developing a model, a framework, methods, and toolsets to support practice conformance measurement in semi-automated ways. Commercialized toolsets based on principles, such as Natural Language Processing (NLP)-Text Mining, Optical Character Recognition (OCR)-Machine Vision, and Process Mining, were applied to achieve semi-automated conformance measurements. A company can utilize this framework and integrate their existing specialty software or other variations by building or customizing their own toolsets.
Details » C.4 C.5 C.6 C.10
3D Education/Building Information Modeling
This project aimed to build a framework for developing 3D interactive education content for the Construction Engineering course. Construction processes are dynamic and complicated. There are many components, and some processes are hard to understand from 2D images or even clips/videos. Thus, to improve the education materials, this project presented a portable interactive 3D education content development framework. As a functional demonstration, education content regarding the rebar work process was created. Students’ performance and satisfaction were evaluated for validation of the framework. Compared to the BIM (Building Information Modeling) education model, the portable interactive education for construction engineering in 3D (PIECE 3D) model developed by this project outperformed in mobility, conveying educational objectives in 3D, enhancing understanding of the process of rebar work, and triggering the interest of students.
Details » C.3 C.7 T.1 T.2 T.3
Sustainability
As the urban population increases and embodied carbon emissions become critical, urban embodied emissions should be considered. This study proposed the concept of urban embodied emissions and suggested an alternative for estimating the emissions using the Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) method., Statistical methods were used among different types of CBR. For cause features, structures, uses, and locations of buildings were selected. For effect features, embodied emissions from different phases of a building were selected. Life-cycle embodied emissions of buildings were then computed to estimate embodied emissions of cities. Visual representation was demonstrated with spatial and temporal dimensions to describe the urban trend in region and time. This approach can be used to analyze the urban life-cycle of embodied emissions.
Details » C.8 C.9 T.4
