| HKU |
The Determinants of Information Technology Applications in Retail under the Context of Shopping Malls in Hong Kong |
Thesis |
04/2018 |
KAM Oi Man |
-- |
N.A. |
| HKUST |
Study on BIM Project Execution Plan and BIM Uses in Comparison with PMBOK |
Report |
06/2020 |
Ka Wing Ngan
HUANG Li |
Project successful strongly relies on PMBOK. Besides that, BIM is important because it is a powerful tool in delivery of BIM-based project. To implement BIM, BIM uses are defined based on project goals. To effective implement BIM as planned, BIM project execution plan (PXP) is necessary to control BIM. In the first section, this paper compares supporting infrastructure from BIM project execution plan (PXP) to PMBOK to find out the relationship. The categories of supporting infrastructure are BIM PXP overview, project information, key project contacts, project goals / BIM uses, organizational roles / staffing, BIM process design, BIM information exchanges, BIM and facility data requirement, collaboration procedures, quality control, technological infrastructure needs, model structure, project deliverables and delivery strategy / contract whereas PMBOK are integration, scope, time, cost, quality, human resources, communication, risk, procurement and stakeholder management. From the investigation, it is found that risk and cost management is not obviously applied from the categories of supporting infrastructure. In the second section, this paper investigate the relationship of various BIM uses in terms of PMBOK. The considerable BIM uses are design authoring, design review, 3D coordination, cost estimation, phase planning (4D Modelling), digital fabrication and site utilization planning. It is also found that scope, communication and human resources management is not obviously applied from the selected BIM uses. In the third section, we recommend that for BIM PXP additional section including project cost management and BIM risk management should be included; and for BIM uses attention should be paid in drafting BIM PXP to support BIM uses and other BIM uses maybe considered. Manager may benefit from the relationship developed and recommendation in BIM implementation. |
N.A. |
| HKUST |
Study on Legal Aspects of BIM Projects |
Report |
06/2020 |
Ka Cheong TANG
Tsz Yin CHOW |
Building Information Modeling (BIM) is an emerging technology applied in Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry. With the increase in the BIM application, some legal uncertainties have appeared and led to a high risk in legal aspects when adopting BIM in design and construction projects. It is vital that BIM users should be aware of the potential legal issues and develop suitable legal documents and contracts to prevent these issues from occurring. Within this context, a critical review on different cases associated with BIM is carried out in order to provide an overview of potential legal issues. Model copyright, right of BIM common data environment control and responsible control were discussed. Furthermore, three protocols and guidelines commissioned by the United Kingdom, the United States and Singapore are compared and analyzed. BIM Protocol published by Construction Industry Council of the United Kingdom is suggested as the most comprehensive and structured protocol in the analysis. Recommendations on the aspects of BIM cyber security, practical completion and contractors’ perspective are made to Hong Kong AEC professional institutes to commission a suitable and comprehensive protocol for the local industry. |
N.A. |
| HKUST |
BIM-based Automatic Piping Layout Design and Schedule Optimization |
Thesis |
08/2020 |
Jyoti SINGH |
Piping system is one crucial component in civil infrastructure that is designed to collect and transport fluid from the various sources to the point of distribution. The design, manufacture, coordination, scheduling, and installation of pipe systems is an important and necessary task and is one of the most time-consuming and complicated jobs in any piping project. Therefore, it is important and necessary to perform pipe systems design and scheduling efficiently. Better understanding of the complex design logic and installation options of a pipe system can enhance the reliability of designing and scheduling, which is crucial to achieve smooth and steady design and schedule flow. An efficient designing and scheduling of piping systems become more and more challenging due to various constraints such as physical, design, economical, and installation constraint. Current practice in the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry involves pipe system design and installation as per enforced design codes, either by manual calculations, or by partial automation using computer-aided design software. Manual calculations are based on the experience of consultants and design codes, which is labor intensive, time consuming, and unadaptable to changes, and often leads to mistakes due to tedious nature of pipe design and coordination problems and the numerous calculations and decision-making involved. Therefore, complete automation with design and schedule optimization are required to economically plan pipe system design layout and generation of installation schedule.
Nowadays, Building Information Modelling (BIM) has been increasingly applied for architectural and structural design in civil engineering, especially in the building sector, since BIM have advantages for digital representation and information management. BIM technology is used to capture the 3D geometric and semantic information of the ceiling space, building components and pipe system information and parameters. BIM technology is used to capture the valuable information from 3D models to assist time based 4D modeling. However, existing research of BIM application for piping system design in building sector is lacking. To tackle the limitation of existing research, this thesis aims to develop an automated BIM-based approach for pipe systems design and schedule optimization.
For the design of pipe system layout, various factors such as building space geometry, system requirements, design code specifications, and locations and configurations of relevant equipments are considered. A framework based on building information modeling (BIM) for automatic pipe system design optimization in 3D environment. Heuristic algorithms are modified and used in a directed weighted graph to obtain the optimal feasible route for pipe system layout. Clashes among pipes and with building components are considered and subsequently avoided in the design optimization. The developed framework considers one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one connections of the pipe network routing. Comparison between heuristic routing algorithms is also presented in this research.
For installation schedule generation, this research proposes a new approach to automate pipe installation coordination and schedule optimization using 4D BIM. Category-based matching rules are used to automate the pairing and integration between 3D BIM models and installation activities. Constraint based analysis by sequence rule is developed to generate favorable sequence and coordination between pipe systems. Heuristic algorithm is adopted to optimize the generated practical schedules based on formulated objective function. All developed BIM-based framework and approaches are illustrated with related examples. Compared to current practices, these proposed approaches significantly reduce the time and cost for pipe system design layout and generating installation schedule.
This research has three parts. The first part is background study and literature review on pipe systems design and scheduling. The second part applies BIM-based framework to design piping system, including the following three studies: (1) an automated single pipe system design using modular approach, (2) multiple pipe system layout design optimization, and (3) comparison of developed approach with other optimization methods. The third part applies BIM-based framework for piping coordination and scheduling optimization |
N.A. |
| HKUST |
Development of Approaches in Embodied Carbon of Buildings: From Construction Materials to Building Structural Design |
Thesis |
08/2016 |
Jielong GAN |
Global warming has been considered as a major environmental challenge nowadays. Among various sources of anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the building sector is one of the major contributors to global warming, in which a substantial amount of the GHG emissions are embodied carbon from construction material production and transportation. Embodied carbon can account for 50% of the life cycle GHG emissions in buildings, and this percentage can become more significant for those buildings with shorter service life or higher energy efficiency. Therefore, reducing the embodied carbon in buildings is critically important and can help decrease the life cycle GHG emissions in buildings, thereby pushing human’s living environment towards a sustainable and low carbon future.
This thesis uses two approaches to reducing the embodied carbon in buildings. The first approach focuses on the construction material aspect and aims to reduce the embodied carbon from the manufacturing processes and transportations of construction materials. In this thesis, only the cement-based material (i.e., concrete) and quarried material (i.e., aggregate) are studied using the construction materials approach, as they account for more than 60% of the embodied carbon in a reinforced concrete (RC) building. Methods to the reduction of embodied carbon of aggregate and concrete are proposed, considering the feature of each material. Aggregate is very heavy and generates a large amount of emissions during transportation, therefore the aggregate study presents a mathematical model based on life cycle assessment (LCA) and multi-objective optimization (MOO) in order to plan the optimal amount of aggregate from different supply sources. The model can help stakeholders formulate sustainable material supply strategies that minimize the embodied carbon and material cost. For the concrete study, embodied carbon from concrete mix proportions is more important. Thus, a systematic embodied carbon quantification and mitigation framework is proposed for low carbon concrete mix design. The parameters that significantly affect the mix design and embodied carbon of concrete, namely the compressive strength class, the cement type, the supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs) and the maximum aggregate size, are considered. The proposed framework can be used to identify the low carbon mix design for concrete, and the results serves as a basis for reducing the embodied carbon emissions in buildings.
Another approach to reducing the embodied carbon in buildings considers different kinds of construction materials together, and focuses on building design aspect in order to minimize the total amounts of construction materials and embodied carbon in buildings. While the previous studies in this particular stream concentrated on low-rise building, they overlooked the analysis on high-rise buildings. However, the structural forms, construction materials and component designs in high-rise buildings are different from those in low-rise buildings, which can cause a large variability in the embodied carbon estimates. Therefore, an embodied carbon accounting methodology based on building information modeling (BIM) for high-rise buildings is proposed in this thesis, and relationships between embodied carbon and the critical parameters in high-rise building design are evaluated through BIM and CFD technologies. A 60-story composite core-outrigger building is designed based on the structure of a typical high-rise building in Hong Kong (i.e., Cheung Kong Center), and then used as a reference for the comparative studies. The results of embodied carbon are expressed in terms of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2-e). The first comparative study focuses on the material procurement strategies. The embodied carbon in the reference building is evaluated with different assumptions for the material manufacturing processes, the amounts of recycled scrap and cement substitutes, and the transportation distance. It is found that structural steel and rebar from traditional blast furnace account for 76% of the embodied carbon in high-rise buildings. If a contractor chooses to use steel from electric arc furnace (with 100% recycled scrap as the feedstock), the embodied carbon of a high-rise building can be decreased by 60%. As for concrete, 10-20% embodied carbon reduction is achieved by using 35% fly ash (FA) or 75% ground granulated blast-furnace slag (GGBS) in mix design. Comparative studies are also carried out to determine the embodied carbon associated with different construction materials, building heights and structural forms. The 60-story composite core-outrigger reference building has a unitary embodied carbon of 557 kg CO2-e/m2 gross floor area (GFA). If the construction material changes to structural steel, the unitary embodied carbon increases to 759 kg CO2-e/m2 GFA, while the value of embodied carbon decreases to 537 kg CO2-e/m2 GFA if RC is used in construction. Core-frame structures are suitable for buildings of 40 stories or below, with the minimum embodied carbon at 525 kg CO2-e/m2 GFA. The optimal height range for core-outrigger structures is from 50-story to 70-story with 530 kg CO2-e/m2 GFA, whereas tubular structures are in the range between 70-story and 90-story at 540 kg CO2-e/m2 GFA. The results serve as a basis for more environmentally friendly building design, thereby improving our built environment towards a sustainable and low carbon future. |
N.A. |
| HKU |
BIM-based Building Approval E-submission in Hong Kong: Prospects and Challenges |
Thesis |
04/2016 |
HUI Put |
-- |
N.A. |
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