Calvin Kam

Capitalizing on Early Project Opportunities to Improve Facility Life-Cycle Performance

This paper presents the findings from the design and construction of the Helsinki University of Technology Auditorium Hall 600 (HUT-600) in Finland. Running simultaneously with the construction project, an international research partnership extensively documented and analyzed the use of product modeling and interoperability standards for information exchange. The project team improved design cycle times and minimized data re-entry through an array of design, visualization, simulation, and analysis tools. Building on the resulting efficiency and time-savings during the early conceptual phase, the project team conducted a variety of in-depth life-cycle studies and alternative comparisons on thermal performance, operation costs, energy consumption, and environmental impact. Such unconventional practices empowered the building owners to better align the long-term facility values with their strategic plans.

Sustainable, age-friendly cities: an evaluative case study

The aging population has a tremendous impact on our community and resources. Planning age-friendly cities is a sustainable solution towards healthy aging and health resources allocation. Our research team developed a framework to systematically evaluate the age-friendliness of cities. The framework encompassed multiple criteria and included assessment using web-based Geographical Information System (GIS) tools. We applied our analytical framework to Palo Alto, Stanford as an illustrative case study. The study site was chosen due to its unique characteristics (% seniors is 30% higher than US average, 80% of whom expressed the desire to continue living in this community) and its proximity to us allowing easy site visits and data access. In this paper, we discuss the results of our analyses, as well as our development of an Age-Friendly Cities Scorecard to translate guidelines into tangible and measureable action items.

Evidence-Based Analyses of Hospital Site Selection for the Aging Population in Dallas, Texas

This paper discusses the feasibility of our decision framework to support hospital site selection for the aging population through a case study based in Dallas, Texas. Currently, many cities face an aging population with escalating healthcare needs, causing challenges to existing resources and planning. Cities must better plan their health care facilities (e.g., hospitals) in a sustainable manner to provide adequate services. Current experience-based decision-making process has too much variation and does not systematically take all factors into account. Our research team developed an evaluative framework and applied the framework as a case study in Dallas, using web-based Geographic Information System (GIS) tools. Our case study demonstrates that the framework and web-based GIS tools provide a foundation for informed decisions in a structured and comprehensive way. Additional population and population health data are required for enhanced application of our framework.

VDC Scorecard: Formulation, Application, and Validation

AbstractThe authors have developed the virtual design and construction (VDC) Scorecard to encompass two characteristics, in which existing VDC assessment frameworks are weak: a holistic framework and adaptive scoring criteria. First, the Scorecard framework was developed to be holistic by including the vocabularies for measuring how well VDC is supporting its objectives. To make the framework holistic, the authors first developed the higher-level structure of the framework based on literature with holistic VDC themes and then refined the lower-level structure of the framework with nested interviews. Second, the scoring criteria were developed to be adaptive to evolving industry norms, which cannot be ignored in a field that is driven by rapid evolution of technology. To make the scoring criteria adaptive, the authors used iterative sampling and comparison methods for establishing the criteria. The resulting assessment framework is able to quantitatively and statistically represent the relationships betwee...