Limiting greenhouse gas emissions has continually gained importance since the Kyoto protocol became effective in 2005. A variety of efforts have been made to reduce energy consumption and introduce supposedly clean and renewable energy that can replace fossil fuelbased energy sources. However, many clean energy sources are not economically viable by themselves, and, therefore, government subsidies are necessary to provide sufficient economic motivation for the installation of new types of energy. For that reason, it is necessary to develop a method for reasonably and accurately determining an appropriate level of government subsidy for private entities. In this paper we propose a real option-based framework for rationally quantifying the amount of government subsidy required by private entities in order to implement a clean energy generation system. A case study that involved the installation of a photovoltaic system in an average household in Seoul, Korea was conducted in order to verify the proposed fra...

Recent increases in the number of irregularly shaped tall buildings have created a need for more applicable formwork methods and automated support for formwork layout planning, which has mainly depended on heuristic approaches based on the intuitive judgment of experienced engineers. This study proposes a new table formwork method integrated with a systematic layout planning approach for tall building construction. Adjustable subunits of the formwork cope with diverse building shapes and the software-based mathematical model helps practitioners make useful layouts for the method with minimal time and effort. In a case study, the proposed layout planning model offered lower costs and improved work efficiency in less time than the heuristic approach. Supported by the planning model, our advanced formwork method showed a 15.5% increase in covered area of irregularly shaped building floors and a 23.9% decrease in material costs compared with existing table formwork methods.

Over the past decades, automation and robotics have been widely adopted in the construction industry as a promising solution for troubleshooting issues. This field is highly interdisciplinary and rapidly changing, and new concepts and ideas are being actively introduced in association with the existing ones. To reveal new insights, the evolution of knowledge in this field needs to be characterized by identifying important knowledge elements and research trends from published data. This study investigated research trends and network characteristics in the field of construction automation and robotics by using a keyword network analysis based on published articles. We analyzed the structure of the keyword network and identified major research topics and their relationships. Notable findings of the research characteristics are as follows. 1) Popular research themes with a set of closely connected keywords continue to be selected and contribute to the evolution of the network. 2) As an interdisciplinary research area, popular keywords that actively interact with other keywords also bridge different clusters of related research concepts. This study could provide useful insights and a better understanding of the knowledge structure and research trends as well as information on future directions in the construction automation and robotics field.