This paper presents a systematic post-occupancy evaluation (POE) of a gated apartment building in Onaizah, Qassim, Saudi Arabia, focusing on resident satisfaction and building performance. Employing a mixed-methods approach, the research combines quantitative data from questionnaires and qualitative data from walkthrough observations and interviews to assess various performance aspects, including thermal comfort, visual comfort, acoustic performance, and safety. Results indicate that residents generally expressed satisfaction with thermal comfort, visual comfort, and indoor air quality. However, concerns were highlighted in areas such as safety and security, design adequacy, and construction support services. These findings reveal that while the building meets many occupant needs, there are critical areas requiring improvement. This study underscores the importance of incorporating POE as a valuable tool for assessing building performance and informing future design and management strategies in residential developments. Finally, this study’s methodology excelled in analyzing the quality and performance of residential building elements, which contributes to enriching the literature related to facilities management. It explains the research strategy followed to provide an organized and reliable framework that can be used to evaluate performance and quality in residential buildings.

The oil and gas (O&G) sector depends on information analysis, making digital transformation vital. Industry-specific factors like environmental, regulatory, operational, and security challenges shape its tech adoption. This paper identifies and examines the barriers and drivers of digital transformation in O&G through a literature review and expert insights, leading to a questionnaire assessment. Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM) was employed to create a structural model that illustrates the interactions between these barriers, helping experts understand how to achieve digitization within the industry. The questionnaire analysis identified the key barriers based on their RII values: “Experiments requiring significant time for validation of new technologies”, “Technical complexities of new technologies”, “Security concerns”, “Insufficient strategies”, and “Organizational culture and resistance to change”. The ISM indicated that the “Technical complexities of new technologies” and the “Lack of readily deployable technologies” are the most influential barriers. Addressing these is crucial for O&G companies to unlock digitalization potential.

The diffraction of a spherical sound wave by a thin hard half-plane is considered. The total field at any position in the space surrounding the edge of the half-plane is composed of three components, two of which are expressed from pure geometrical considerations, and a third component which seems to originate from fictive sound sources situated on the edge of the half plane. This paper takes the expression of the edge-diffracted field as formulated in the Biot-Tolstoy theory of diffraction for the case of a doublet sound signal emanating from the sound source [Biot and Tolstoy (1957). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 29, 381–391] but rearranged later in a more tractable form by Medwin [(1981). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 69, 1060–1064] for the more general case of a Dirac-like pulse. Hence a development in the frequency domain of the Fourier transform of the exact expression of the edge-diffracted field in the time domain takes into consideration a part with known special mathematical functions, and a part containing a serial development. This latter also expressed in some special mathematical functions, converges quite rapidly to the numerical Fourier transform of the exact time-domain expression. The presented solution may be used as a good approximation in simulations and in real case predictions of sound attenuation by thin hard barriers.