The Urban Heat Island (UHI) caused by building densification greatly impacts the sustainability of urban residents and the environment. Therefore, it is necessary to utilize the envelope space of buildings for green retrofitting so that they can contribute to mitigating the UHI effect. In particular, green retrofitting of existing and historic buildings has become an effective means to improve the resilience of cities in the modernization process. In this study, Vertical Greenery Systems (VGS) were proposed for traditional commercial and residential buildings in Guangzhou, China. Digital Twin (DT) technology was applied to simulate the VGS construction method and irrigation to visualize the process of VGS construction for old commercial and residential buildings. In addition, the building heat and cooling consumption of the three-dimensional greening of the storage room on the ground floor of the arcade-housing and the living room on the top floor were analyzed according to the thermal parameters of different vertical greening types and different material facades. Finally, the modification of the west and south walls as a greening system was identified as the best energy-saving solution, and this finding provided reasonable theoretical support for the energy-saving design of the three-dimensional greening building of the arched house on South Street, a historic building with a combination of commercial and residential buildings.

The safety inspection capability of construction sites before typhoons could be improved using a UAV, which has a rapid identification capability. However, the main safety inspection items need construction experience and technical safety specifications. This study aimed to obtain the influencing factors of typhoon and their weight proportion through the knowledge of disaster theory and the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). The effectiveness of this method was verified by collecting and analyzing the field data at the construction site. A set of construction site early warning flows and disaster prevention and mitigation measures for typhoons are proposed. The results show that UAVs can be used as a tool in this scenario, helping to improve disaster prevention and enhancing the capability of construction site management to evaluate typhoon risk. The research provides a much-needed common ground for collecting and analyzing advances in UAVs and immersive technologies, as well as their influence on building projects. Furthermore, this article provides a new horizon for beginner researchers working on digitalized construction research.

Emergency evacuation simulation is significant for architectural design and emergency plan implementation. To explore the influence of evacuees’ physical behavior and evacuees’ decisions on the evacuation process, as well as to address the problems of traditional emergency evacuation models with insufficient detail of the situation (realism), low reusability, poor operability, and lack of subsequent scalability, this paper first analyzed pedestrian characteristics in emergencies. To describe pedestrian decision-making in an emergent evacuation situation, a multi-agent design based on decision theory was proposed, solving the multi-agent decision-making problem in an emergency evacuation environment by the A* algorithm. Then the designed multi-agent was embedded into the social force model by AnyLogic software. Finally, the model reproduces the pedestrian evacuation process in an emergency evacuation situation on the built platform, depicting three kinds of typical behaviors: pedestrian partnering, obstacle avoidance, and exit competition. In addition, this study also analyzed a large student apartment building by example and proposed corresponding optimization solutions to improve its evacuation capacity through simulation results.

Although many project portfolio management tools have been developed, little has been found capable of evaluating and managing project quality, cost, and schedule simultaneously. Limited cross-project references also limit lessons learned in the context of triple constraints. This study aims to embed quality check into the earned value management (EVM) method and develop an extended tool for triple constraint management based on EVM. The purpose is to evaluate and manage the triple constraints of a project in one go, incorporating quality management and portfolio management functions into costing and scheduling. The newly developed tools are tested and validated in real-world case studies. It was proven to assist project portfolio stakeholders in triple constraints planning, organizing, monitoring, managing, and reporting using a single reporting format.