Building Information Modeling (BIM) has catalyzed transformative shifts across various industries, which has sparked broader research interests in the BIM lifecycle. However, studies that specify the stated requirements for different technologies and methodologies from the perspective of the BIM lifecycle and analyze research hotspots and future research trends at each stage are scarce. Employing scientometric theories and methods, this study conducts an in-depth comparative analysis of BIM lifecycle stages. The analysis encompasses several aspects like annual research output and knowledge flows, in the aim of unveiling disparities in the technological requirements, defining research boundaries, and illuminating lifecycle research trends. Findings indicate an ongoing surge in research across all BIM lifecycle stages with technologies like digital twins and artificial intelligence becoming prevailing trends. The cooperative design of BIM components, virtual-real world coordination, interactions among buildings, individuals, and environments, as well as the in-depth integration of BIM with the multifaceted fields of urban management have emerged as focal points in the planning, construction, management, and maintenance of BIM, respectively. Future BIM lifecycle research will necessitate interdisciplinary collaboration, emphasizing technological integration, common data environment (CDE) information sharing, open-source BIM/historic building information modeling (HBIM) system, and impactful exploration in areas like urban construction and historical preservation.

Traffic flow forecasting is an important function of intelligent transportation systems. With the rise of deep learning, building traffic flow prediction models based on deep neural networks has become a current research hotspot. Most of the current traffic flow prediction methods are designed from the perspective of model architectures, using only the traffic features of future moments as supervision signals to guide the models to learn the spatiotemporal dependence in traffic flow. However, traffic flow data themselves contain rich spatiotemporal features, and it is feasible to obtain additional self-supervised signals from the data to assist the model to further explore the underlying spatiotemporal dependence. Therefore, we propose a self-supervised traffic flow prediction method based on a spatiotemporal masking strategy. A framework consisting of symmetric backbone models with asymmetric task heads were applied to learn both prediction and spatiotemporal context features. Specifically, a spatiotemporal context mask reconstruction task was designed to force the model to reconstruct the masked features via spatiotemporal context information, so as to assist the model to better understand the spatiotemporal contextual associations in the data. In order to avoid the model simply making inferences based on the local smoothness in the data without truly learning the spatiotemporal dependence, we performed a temporal shift operation on the features to be reconstructed. The experimental results showed that the model based on the spatiotemporal context masking strategy achieved an average prediction performance improvement of 1.56% and a maximum of 7.72% for longer prediction horizons of more than 30 min compared with the backbone models.

Investigating causal interactions between entities is a crucial task across various scientific domains. The traditional causal discovery methods often assume a predetermined causal direction, which is problematic when prior knowledge is insufficient. Identifying causal directions from observational data remains a key challenge. Causal discovery typically relies on two priors: the uniform prior and the Solomonoff prior. The Solomonoff prior theoretically outperforms the uniform prior in determining causal directions in bivariate scenarios by using the causal independence mechanism assumption. However, this approach has two main issues: it assumes that no unobserved variables affect the outcome, leading to method failure if violated, and it relies on the uncomputable Kolmogorov complexity (KC). In addition, we employ Kolmogorov’s structure function to analyze the use of the minimum description length (MDL) as an approximation for KC, which shows that the function class used for computing the MDL introduces prior biases, increasing the risk of misclassification. Inspired by the insufficient but necessary part of an unnecessary but sufficient condition (INUS condition), we propose an asymmetry where the expected complexity change in the cause, due to changes in the effect, is greater than the reverse. This criterion supplements the causal independence mechanism when its restrictive conditions are not met under the Solomonoff prior. To mitigate prior bias and reduce misclassification risk, we introduce a multilayer perceptron based on the universal approximation theorem as the backbone network, enhancing method stability. Our approach demonstrates a competitive performance against the SOTA methods on the TCEP real dataset. Additionally, the results on synthetic datasets show that our method maintains stability across various data generation mechanisms and noise distributions. This work advances causal direction determination research by addressing the limitations of the existing methods and offering a more robust and stable approach.