Purpose: The purpose of this study is to develop and assess the real-time multiuser virtual reality (VR) application that can be used in the design review process. In particular, the application was aimed to accommodate the design review meetings conducted among participants who are in different locations, which has become commonplace during the COVID-19 outbreak. Design/methodology/approach: This paper presents a methodology for the development of a real-time multiuser immersive VR application, to support remote collaboration during the design review process. The developed application can immerse remote project participants into the same virtual environment and provide virtual face-to-face discussions. An experiment was conducted with 44 university students to investigate the applicability and performance of the developed application by comparing it with the traditional approach. Findings: Results indicated that the group of students who used the developed immersive VR application outperformed the group that used the traditional approach. This was measured by the percentage of correctly identified design errors during a building inspection experiment. Originality/value: The difficulty of bringing remote stakeholders together in a virtual environment has impeded the implementation of VR technology in the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry. Most research has focused on the improvement of a single user’s experience. Most of the previous multiuser VR studies were conducted in other industries while similar research in the AEC industry is limited. The study presented in this paper contributes to the AEC industry by presenting the development of multiuser immersive VR applications for real-time remote collaboration and the empirical evidence to substantiate its potential benefits.

Renovation is known to be a complicated type of construction project and prone to errors compared to new constructions. The need to carry out renovation work while keeping normal business activities running, coupled with strict governmental building renovation regulations, presents an important challenge affecting construction performance. Given the current availability of robust hardware and software, building information modeling (BIM) and optimization tools have become essential tools in improving construction planning, scheduling, and resource management. This study explored opportunities to develop a multi-objective genetic algorithm (MOGA) on existing BIM. The data were retrieved from a renovation project over the 2018–2020 period. Direct and indirect project costs, actual schedule, and resource usage were tracked and retrieved to create a BIM-based MOGA model. After 500 generations, optimal results were provided as a Pareto front with 70 combinations among total cost, time usage, and resource allocation. The BIM-MOGA can be used as an efficient tool for construction planning and scheduling using a combination of existing BIM along with MOGA into professional practices. This approach would help improve decision-making during the construction process based on the Pareto front data provided.

This research proposes a decision support system for weir sluice gate level adjusting. The proposed system, named AWARD (Appropriate Weir Adjustment with Water Requirement Deliberation), is composed of three modules, which are (1) water level prediction, (2) sluice gates setting period estimation, and (3) sluice gates level adjusting calculation. The AWARD system applies an artificial neural network technique for water level prediction, a fuzzy logic control algorithm for sluice gate setting period estimation, and hydraulics equations for sluice gate level adjusting. The water requirements and supplies are deducted from the field-survey and telemetry stations in Chiang Rai Province, Thailand. The results show that the proposed system can accurately estimate the water volume. Water level prediction shows high accuracy. The standard error of prediction (SEP) is 2.58 cm and the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) is 7.38%. The sluice gate setting period is practically adjusted. The sluice gate level is adjusted according to the water requirement.