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Construction Site Risk Analysis Based on Shannon Entropy: a Case Study Application

This paper provides a method based on information theory for risk analysis and evaluation. A basic method to construction site risk evaluation by the Shannon entropy is used in this paper. Safety and technical risk of the building construction process has been calculated by Shannon’s entropy, which provides information of the system, of various kinds under uncertainties. The method has been applied to a case study in Florence, Italy and the results have been compared to those obtained by the application of the commonly used management and assessments (FMEA/FMECA). The information theory application using risk entropy, to macro and micro-phases of the studied process, that concern the actions and factors, the corresponding risk elements defined by FMEA/FMECA, is used to identify and quantify the potential risks and critical levels of each working process condition for each different project phase. The validity of the proposed method is justified by the correspondence between results for two alternative project solutions. This proposed method is useful in evaluating different alternative measures for finding less damage and hazards at designing stages for reducing and controlling each kind of risk. It also provides a homogeneous scale for the parameter evaluation and a rational criterion for linking and integrating the risk evaluation factors.

IT Procedures For Simulation Of Historical Building Restoration Site

Dealing with renovation and restoration of historical building heritage, often means facing several difficulties concerning the way of representing not only the ancient building and the design ideas, but also phases of interventions on site. The designers have always to take into account a range of possible compatible solutions that avoid endangering the cultural significance of the historical building. Traditional methods are often time consuming and barely efficient, because they are related to exchange two-dimensional and paper-based support information. The Building Information Modeling may represent an answer to these problems, allowing the users to model the three-dimensional compounds of the building and to link a variety of information to it. This work intends to propose an innovative approach to the construction management of historical building interventions, based on BIM technologies, facing different kinds of problems, such as: parametric modeling of historical buildings, starting with laser scanner survey: LoD (level of detail) definition and measurement accuracy related to modeling procedures; parametric modeling of the site and the several phases of the restoration works in a fixed schedule (4D dimension); 3D graphic representation of safety procedures and related tools. The case study was offered by the SS. Nome di Maria church (Italy), built in 1748, which was seriously damaged during the earthquake that occurred in Italy in 2012.

Constructability and Safety Performance Based Design: A Design and Assessment Tool for the Building Process

The theme of this contribution fits astride two strands of Construction Management Studies: “health and safety risk management” on construction site and “constructability” design approach. Specifically we faces two problems usually considered separately: the lack of specificity, synergy, effectiveness between safety planning and construction process and the lack of concurrence between design and construction process. The proposed approach assigns to design the key role of optimizing both constructability and safety planning in a unique and simultaneous procedure. The purpose is to improve “working plan” design level by specific construction simulation and the related safety assessment in the perspective of the better constructability performance and final building results. The proposed method is a Construction Management Approach supported by design tool based on working directly on design drawings. Starting from the representation of construction details, their construction can be simulated. This is obtained analyzing construction details by means of progressive drawings that express and simulate the breakdown of construction phases, chronologically processed and logically related. In these specific drawings all the elements of the construction site are graphically placed. The procedure allows both to perform the specific and detailed safety assessment for the realization of construction detail components, and to verify the constructability of them. The safety and constructability analysis is so performed in a graphical way during the design process not waiting the construction phase. So we are still able to intervene, if necessary, with amendments under the designer control.

A Decision Support System (DSS) for Constructability Assessment in Seismic Retrofit of Complex Buildings

Choosing the optimal strategy for the seismic retrofit of an existing building is a difficult problem. This difficulty increases in the case of complex buildings systems with different strategic requirements in terms of organization layout and structural features. This paper contributes to solving this complexity by combining management and technical strategies, especially in situations of comparable times and costs. It is demonstrated that the best way to obtain final results that are consistent with the initial requirements is to intervene at the beginning of the design stage. To this end the implementation of a Decision Support System (DSS) aided by Information Technology (IT) is presented for making a constructability assessment of the seismic retrofit of complex buildings. Different seismic retrofit scenarios compete to be the optimal retrofit solution. Several evaluation systems are combined with classic constructability-based tools to produce an organic framework. A rule-based engine that utilizes this framework can be implemented on top of userfriendly software. The DSS intends to control building management by prefiguring a real ongoing building execution after the early stages of the project. This is made possible by using the simulation of site safety layout in all compatible scenarios. By managing the output data of IT models it is possible to assess both management and structural strategies. In the end the DSS combines them to choose the most favorable overall solution. Looking towards future development, it can be seen that applications of a BIM Platform integrated with the proposed DSS have considerable potential in construction management practice.