© 2015 The Author(s). Published by Taylor & Francis.Designers can contribute to enhancing the safety of construction work by considering how their decisions impact on both the physical environment in which construction workers operate and the means and methods they use. To do so, however, designers require knowledge about safety hazards on site and the opportunity to examine their designs early in projects. Through a set of studies virtual reality tools were used to examine the potential for collaborative dialogue between designers and builders to provide a forum for learning and proactive change of a design to make a project safer to build. In the tests, participants viewed proposed designs using virtual reality to examine various alternative design and construction scenarios. The study shows that consultation and dialogue with an experienced construction professional are highly beneficial for designers to appreciate the implications of designs on safety, and that designers are more willing to adapt design details than to change aesthetic aspects of their designs

A Building Digital Twin (BDT) can maintain an up-to-date digital model reflecting physical world conditions and has become necessary for building applications. Recent studies on the BDT employed the Internet of Things to sense physical-world conditions. Although cameras are one of the most widely-used facilities in buildings, their adoption in the BDT remains unexplored. This study proposes a novel computer-vision(CV)-enabled BDT scheme using Building Information Modelling (BIM) taking camera videos as input, which addresses the dimension, coordinate system, and object inconsistencies between BIM and camera videos. Firstly, the proposed BDT scheme detects objects’ locations and rotations jointly using a two-dimensional (2D) object detection network and a three-dimensional (3D) object estimation network. Then, Theorem and Lemmas are presented to compute the 3D locations in BIM coordinate system using detected 2D locations. Thirdly, both cold-start object matching and run-time object matching schemes are proposed to address the object inconsistency between camera videos and BIM. Finally, experiments were conducted in the real-world environment. The experiment results showed that the proposed BDT scheme maintained average location errors of 0.181$m$ with distortions preserved and 0.165$m$ with distortions removed in the manual calibration scenario, 0.166$m$ with distortions preserved, and 0.195$m$ with distortions removed in automatic calibration scenario. This finding proved the effectiveness of the proposed BDT scheme. This study is the first to explore a BDT scheme on top of BIM using CV. It is anticipated that this study will inspire more intelligent studies in smart buildings jointly employing both CV and BIM.

Construction planning plays a fundamental role in construction project management that requires teamwork among planners from a diverse range of disciplines and in geographically dispersed working situations. Model-based four-dimensional (4D) computer-aided design (CAD) groupware, though considered a possible approach to supporting collaborative planning, is still short of effective collaborative mechanisms for teamwork because of methodological, technological, and social challenges. Targeting this problem, this paper proposes a model-based groupware solution to enable a group of multidisciplinary planners to perform real-time collaborative 4D planning across the Internet. In light of the interactive definition method, and its computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW) design analysis, this paper discusses the realization of interactive collaborative mechanisms from software architecture, application mode, and data exchange protocol. These mechanisms have been integrated into a groupware solution...

Purpose: – The purpose of this paper is to clarify the CSCW in collaborative 4D modelling and its user interface (UI)/interaction designs for prototyping. Four-dimensional (4D) modelling technology has potentials to integrate geographically dispersed planners to achieve collaborative construction planning. However, applying this technology in teamwork remains a challenge in computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW). Design/methodology/approach: – The research adopted user-centred design (UCD) methodology to investigate a usable 4D collaboration prototype through analysis, design and usability testing. By applying CSCW theories, it first clarified the meaning of 4D CSCW to formulate design propositions as design target. By leveraging UCD theories, subsequently, the first-stage research sought an optimal standalone 4D modelling prototype following a parallel design approach. At the second stage, it further investigated into a collaborative 4D modelling prototype using an iterative design. It adopted collaborative task analysis into the UI/interaction design extension for a collaborative prototype based on results obtained from the first stage. The final usability testing was performed on the collaborative prototype to evaluate the designed CSCW and UI in a controlled geographically dispersed teamwork situation. Findings: – The test results and user feedback verified their usability. It also disclosed design weaknesses in collaborators’ awareness and smooth tasks’ transitions for further enhancement. Originality/value: – The combination of CSCW and UCD theories is practical for designing collaborative 4D modelling. It can also benefit designs for collaborative modelling in other dimensions like cost analysis, sustainable design, facility management, etc. in building information modelling.