Haijiang Li

BIM Based Virtual Environment for Fire Emergency Evacuation

Recent building emergency management research has highlighted the need for the effective utilization of dynamically changing building information. BIM (building information modelling) can play a significant role in this process due to its comprehensive and standardized data format and integrated process. This paper introduces a BIM based virtual environment supported by virtual reality (VR) and a serious game engine to address several key issues for building emergency management, for example, timely two-way information updating and better emergency awareness training. The focus of this paper lies on how to utilize BIM as a comprehensive building information provider to work with virtual reality technologies to build an adaptable immersive serious game environment to provide real-time fire evacuation guidance. The innovation lies on the seamless integration between BIM and a serious game based virtual reality (VR) environment aiming at practical problem solving by leveraging state-of-the-art computing technologies. The system has been tested for its robustness and functionality against the development requirements, and the results showed promising potential to support more effective emergency management.

A rule-based semantic approach for automated regulatory compliance in the construction sector

A rule-based semantic approach for compliance checking.An ontological framework for regulatory compliance checking.Extracting regulations from semantic analysis of textual documents.Semantic rules to deliver regulatory compliance checking based on instances of the proposed ontology.Semantic mapping of regulations to data file formats. A key concern for professionals in any industry is ensuring regulatory compliance. Regulations are often complex and require in depth technical knowledge of the domain in which they operate. The level of technical detail and complexity in regulations is a barrier to their automation due to extensive software development time and costs that are involved. In this paper we present a rule-based semantic approach formulated as a methodology to overcome these issues by allowing domain experts to specify their own regulatory compliance systems without the need for extensive software development. Our methodology is based on the key idea that three semantic contexts are needed to fully understand the regulations being automated: the semantics of the target domain, the specific semantics of regulations being considered, and the semantics of the data format that is to be checked for compliance. This approach allows domain experts to create and maintain their own regulatory compliance systems, within a semantic domain that is familiar to them. At the same time, our approach allows for the often diverse nature of semantics within a particular domain by decoupling the specific semantics of regulations from the semantics of the domain itself. This paper demonstrates how our methodology has been validated using a series of regulations automated by professionals within the construction domain. The regulations that have been developed are then in turn validated on real building data stored in an industry specific format (the IFCs). The adoption of this methodology has greatly advanced the process of automating these complex sets of construction regulations, allowing the full automation of the regulation scheme within 18months. We believe that these positive results show that, by adopting our methodology, the barriers to the building of regulatory compliance systems will be greatly lowered and the adoption of three semantic domains proposed by our methodology provides tangible benefits.

Towards intelligent agent based software for building related decision support

To automatically deliver enhanced knowledge relating to building use, for tasks such as facility management (FM), a software system has been developed that exploits the combination of a number of technologies. As well as generating useful knowledge for decision support, the software aims to remove reliance on expert users, be self configuring, continually adapt to the environment, and employ learning to evolve its performance. The system is realised centrally by a multi agent society in which the agents are characterised by the strong notion of agency using the BDI (belief, desire, intention) model. In most existing applications in construction agents are task focussed rather than the goal focussed deliberative agents employed here. The BDI model is a ‘natural’ (human) abstraction for modelling complex systems, and goals are a stable way to define required behaviour. The agents are supported by a range of ontologies describing the semantics of the domain as well as aspects of agents’ goals. Furthermore the agents utilise a distributed network of readily available wired and wireless sensors and associated data storage providing access to near real time and historical data, as well as an Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) model describing building geometry and construction. The system produced can be used by non-specialist users, simply requiring an IFC specification of the building and sensor locations. Agents infer the roles of the sensors from an ontology together with context, and assign appropriate roles. The agents individually and cooperatively work towards identifying the usage and dynamics of arbitrarily sized spaces in buildings. Such knowledge can be used to support FM decisions such as the optimisation of the energy consumption/environmental comfort demand trade-off. Negotiation is used to increase robustness as well as to fill in missing information. The limitations of practical application of the technologies that failed to deliver expected benefit are also detailed.

Public perception of the risk of disasters in a developing economy: the case of Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia has in recent years experienced frequent disasters, including flooding, epidemics, and dust storms, while many parts of the country are subject to regular earthquake and volcanic activity. The paper examines public perception of the risk of disasters in this interesting socio-cultural and regional environment not already covered by existing literature. A wide national survey conducted between March and May 2012 resulted in 1,164 responses across the 13 regions of Saudi Arabia. The study showed that the majority of the participants have faith that God is in control of the world and that disasters may be a punishment from him. However, this does not hinder their desire to be prepared to cope with disasters. It also highlighted that direct experience with such disasters does not directly influence perception. The research findings lead to the emergence of a number of recommendations regarding raising awareness of hazards and the risk of disasters, including education, training, encouraging voluntary work, and improving public access to vital information resources. A requirement for research into resilience also emerges, to prepare communities to cope with disasters; this is the focus of the authors’ future research.

A proposed model for sustainable urban planning development for environmentally friendly communities

The purpose of this study is to shed light on the importance of sustainable urban planning development for communities and give a comprehensive review of key issues in terms of underpinning concepts, principles and challenges. The study will focus on a number of aspects related to the built environment, neighbourhoods and services, including the infrastructure, and public transport. Moreover, it aims to critically evaluate the most common and established frameworks of sustainable urban communities. Limitations of these frameworks are discussed, including regional variations. These are factored in a new approach for sustainable communities. The contribution of this research is to propose a scalable framework for an effective sustainable urban planning development for communities that address the gaps and the limitations of the existing models. This takes into account the core issues of urban communities including environmental, social, economic and planning perspectives.

Delphi-based consensus study into a framework of community resilience to disaster

Disasters cannot be prevented but their impacts can be mitigated through adapted disaster management strategies. Several studies confirm that community resilience is a significant factor in disaster management. Saudi Arabia is (a) increasingly exposed to disasters, as reflected in recent events, and (b) lacks a credible disaster management strategy. This paper aims to develop a framework of community resilience to disaster in Saudi Arabia. A three-round Delphi study is conducted using a local and an international panel of experts with in-depth knowledge in the wide field of disaster management. General dimensions and criteria for consideration are derived from the academic literature. The latter are used by the expert panel as a starting point to achieve consensus on a framework of community resilience to disasters, focused on six resilience dimensions: social; economic; physical and environmental; governance; health and well-being; and information and communication. A total of 62 criteria are identified. Fifty-seven of these criteria achieved consensus in Round 2. An additional five criteria reached consensus in the third round. The resulting community resilience framework involves seven to fourteen criteria in each of the six identified dimensions.

Towards Automated Compliance Checking in the Construction Industry

The Construction industry has a complex structure of regulatory compliance, consisting of statutory requirements and performance based regulations. The increasing importance of sustainability has further intensified this, with a new buildings compliance against sustainability assessment methodologies now often an important contractual requirement. Automatic compliance checking against these requirements has been long sought after within this industry and several approaches have attempted to achieve this goal. The key improvement that can be made to many existing approaches is enabling the development and maintenance of the regulations by those who are most qualified to do this the domain experts. This is illustrated by the fact that in many cases regulatory compliance systems are closed and when modifications are needed they must be made by softwares developers. This process is simply not viable in this industries rapidly changing environment. In this paper we describe our framework for compliance checking, showing the potential for utilising an integrated process to enable domain experts to create and maintain their own regulations that can then be executed by an open source rule engine. We will describe our process, the methodology and software developed to support it. We will present our initial results in the form of two case studies illustrating progress towards automation of commonly used regulations. Finally, we will also discuss how our approach could be generalised to other related sectors to enable the adoption of a similar approach towards automatic regulatory compliance.

Engaging construction stakeholders with sustainability through a knowledge harvesting platform

With the new regulations and policies related to climate change, the construction industry has been put under pressure to increase the sustainability of its practices. Many organisations are now adapting their practices to meet government legislative targets (e.g. reducing carbon emissions) and consider the environmental, social and economic performance of buildings. In addition, the sustainable construction is also a rapidly changing field, with technological advances, changes in legislation and increasingly educated clients driving the industry to constantly adapt to remain competitive. This represents a key problem for construction professionals as they must continually be aware of new information, best practices, technologies and changing legislation (at a local, national and international level) which are often disseminated from different organisations/individuals through dispersed media. This paper presents a web-based platform solution that provides integrated access to sustainability resources in the form of interactive, dynamic, and user-oriented services that fully exploit latest advances in computing technologies. The platform is an open, scalable and polymorphic context-based solution with modules enabling serendipitous information and knowledge discovery by utilising a symbiosis of technologies such as semantic web, social networking and mobile computing. An initial prototype has been developed, implemented and tested followed by a revised platform which has now been released in a continuing process of incremental development to ensure a fully functional and accepted solution.

A semantic service-oriented platform for energy efficient buildings

The construction industry is under pressure to increase the sustainability of its practices to meet UK commitments for reducing energy consumption and alleviating climate change. The research uses a mixed-method approach drawn from recent studies to explore the readiness, maturity and level of engagement of construction stakeholders in adopting the UK government sustainability agenda. Limited positive energy practices and sustainability regulatory awareness, combined with information provision deficiencies, form some of the key barriers to sustainable construction faced by industry. A service-oriented platform that provides integrated access to sustainability resources in the form of interactive, dynamic and user-oriented services that fully exploit latest advances in computing technologies is proposed to address these barriers. In this paper, we specifically elaborate on how a service-oriented system can be efficiently used for performing (near) real-time energy optimisation in buildings, greatly contributing to engaging construction stakeholders with sustainability practices. The solution disseminates energy efficient practices and provides support for building managers in implementing energy efficient optimisation plans. The solution is tested and validated through a number of energy efficiency scenarios developed as part of the EU FP7 SportE2 project.

A generic cloud platform for engineering optimization based on OpenStack

Optimizations have been applied in many different engineering fields. Most of these applications may have similar characteristics: intensive on computing resources, time-consuming on calculation iterations, similar on computing environments and so on. This paper describes a generic cloud platform for engineering optimization by leveraging the compute resources hosted in cloud datacenters. The methodology developed was to decompose the engineering optimization processes into several interconnected sub-tasks, which were further converted and implemented as virtual applications for dynamic cloud deployment using OpenStack. The system can dynamically allocate and recycle the compute resources according to the specific engineering optimization applications. The research presented in the paper contributes on the generic engineering optimization process virtualization and cloud computing based implementation with innovative algorithms development. The system test results showed a way that potentially engineering optimization problems could be embedded into the put forward platform due to the developed large scale and intelligent cloud based optimization services. Further applications for building energy simulation and optimization, stents optimization, water distribution optimization are currently under development.