FYPs/Thesis/Journal from Higher Education Institutions in Hong Kong

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Institution Title Type Date Author(s) Abstract Link
HKU Application of information technology in materials logistics in the Hong Kong construction industry Thesis 04/2000 YAN Kwok Wing -- N.A.
HKUST Application of Building Information Modeling Technology for Safe Operations and Decommissioning of Offshore Oil and Gas Platforms Thesis 08/2018 Yi TAN Offshore oil and gas platforms (OOGPs) usually have a lifetime of 30-40 years. The operation and maintenance stage takes up the most percentage of the whole lifetime of OOGPs. During the operations and maintenance, there are several safety issues. Emergent accidents and exposure to high level of noise are two main issues. Traditional emergency responses include 2D escape plan guidance and real drill exercises. 2D escape plan usually causes different understanding, while real drill exercises require extra time and workforce. As for current noise controls, only personal protective equipment has been commonly employed, which is the least effective noise control. In addition, as increasing number of OOGPs will be retired and decommissioned in the coming decade, disassembling offshore platforms is an unavoidable activity. During OOGP decommissioning stage, there are also several safety issues such as potential clashes when conducting heavy lift operations and lift vessel capsize. Besides, when multiple lift vessels are working together to disassemble multiple offshore platforms, more than one vessel working at the same platform, which can significantly increase lift clashes, is another safety issues. Current approaches to addressing these safety issues at the decommissioning stage are usually based on experience, and manually planned. Considering all these safety issues mentioned above, automated, efficient, and accurate approaches to improving safety management of OOGPs at both operation and decommissioning stages are desired. However, limited researches have been conducted to tackle these safety issues. Therefore, this research aims to develop automated, efficient, and accurate techniques and approaches for safer operations and decommissioning of OOGPs.

Building information modeling (BIM) technology is widely used in the building and infrastructure industries for the past decade considering the rich geometric and semantic information BIM contains. Therefore, this research applies BIM technology to efficiently provide required information of OOGPs when developing new approaches to addressing safety issues.

For the operation and maintenance stage of an offshore platform, to better respond to emergent accidents, a BIM-based evacuation evaluation model is developed to efficiently simulate and evaluate different emergency scenarios, and improve evacuation performance on offshore platforms. As for the noise control, this research proposes a BIM-supported 4D acoustics simulation approach. The proposed approach can automatically conduct noise simulation for offshore platforms using the information extracted from BIM models. Maintenance schedules can then be optimized based on simulated results. By minimizing the time of exposing to a high level of noise, the noise impact on maintenance workers is well mitigated.

For the decommissioning stage, first, a semi-automated approach to generate 4D/5D BIM models to evaluate different OOGP decommissioning option is developed. Second, automated topsides disassembly planning approach based on BIM is developed. Clash-free lift paths can be generated to avoid clashes during heavy lifts. Module layouts on vessels are optimized to minimize the total heavy lift time and to guarantee the stability of lift vessels. Besides, a schedule clash detection method is also developed to make sure that no more than one vessel is working at one offshore platform simultaneously.

All developed BIM-based approaches are illustrated with related examples. Compared to current practices, these proposed approaches improve the safety management performance of offshore platforms.
N.A.
HKUST Analytical review and evaluation of civil information modelling (CIM) Journal 04/2016 Cheng, J.C.P., Lu, Q., and Deng, Y. Building information modeling (BIM) has been widely adopted in the building industry. However, the use of BIM in civil infrastructure facilities, sometimes referred to as civil information modeling (CIM) has been slow in its application. Industry and academia are increasingly putting effort into CIM study and implementation, but so far there has been no comprehensive review of their effort in this regard. This paper presents a framework to evaluate the current practices of CIM adoption for various civil infrastructure facilities. In this study, civil infrastructure facilities were divided into nine categories for evaluation and the effort with regard to CIM adoption for each civil infrastructure category was evaluated in six aspects. Based on the evaluation and comparison results of 171 case studies and 62 academic papers on CIM, research gaps were identified and recommendations were made. For example, the findings show that data schema development for civil infrastructure facilities other than bridges, roads, and tunnels are lacking. The results and research gaps revealed by this study are useful for both researchers and practitioners. Link
HKUST Analysis of Urban Walkability Using BIM and 3D GIS Models FYP 06/2020 LAI, Chi Ching
POON, Kwok Ho
Walkability, which is defined as the friendliness of a city or district towards walking, has been evaluated in the current Urban Design Report released by the Planning Department. The ultimate target of urban planning is not only being walkable but also provides comfortable walkways for pedestrians to travel through the city. Surveying and walking audit are the two common methods to measure the walkability of a district. However, the two methods are subjected to personal views and labor-intensive in data collection. This study tries to integrate Building Information Modeling (BIM), medial axis transform (MAT) network, and pedestrian flow simulation to analyze the walkability of Kwun Tong District. This approach digitizes the study region with rich geometric and semantic information for comprehensive analysis, which could present high similarity to the real environment. The BIM model of this study is a 3D model of the Kwun Tong District binding with information of the walking facilities such as the opening hours and slope of the walkway. The 3D pedestrian network, which indicates the walkable paths in the 3D model with walkway information, is built on the BIM model in order to calculate the time cost using a self-defined utility function. Pathfinder is used for pedestrian flow simulation to capture videos of pedestrians walking in the specific route in the BIM model, which gives realistic and clear illustrations in the walking environment. This study covers the area along Ngau Tau Kok Station to Kwun Tong Station, including residential area and commercial area, which is able to simulate various pedestrian walking behaviors in different districts. Three phases of simulations are carried out in the study region in this project, trying to demonstrate the working principle of the study method by analyzing the walkability of a specific region, sorting out the problems, and trying to improve the walkability with alteration in the BIM model. The ultimate target of the study is to provide a platform for walkability analysis so that the effectiveness of the urban planning policies can be simulated before adoption. N.A.
HKUST Analysis of Urban Walkability Using BIM and 3D GIS Models FYP 06/2019 NG, Ho Yin
NG, Sze Wai
Walkability problems are serious issues that influences people’s daily lifestyle. Providing a walkable environment is crucial to maintaining the living standard of people. Therefore, the proposal of Policy Address 2017 from the Hong Kong government has proposed the idea of the development of a walkable city. Kwun Tong was industrialized in an early stage and it was realized that many facilities were not satisfied with the standard of the barrier-free facility so it had undoubtedly been one of the targets. In the past, people analyzed walkability problems using the scoring system, observation or on-site investigation. However these approaches were extremely time-consuming, and were lack of efficiency and effectiveness to tackle the problem. Also, it was difficult to realize both macroscopic and microscopic problems at the same time. Hence, this project aims at dealing with the walkability problems by applying the smart technology, Building Modelling Information Technology (BIM) as well as Graphic Information System (GIS) while this report is mainly focusing on the BIM part at this first developing stage. BIM has been applied in the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry for over a decade but there is less application on the walkability problems in Hong Kong.

The ultimate objective of this project is to enhance and promote the concept of walkability to citizens by applying the policy using smart technology. This project is divided into three stages. The first stage will develop a 3D BIM model of the real district, Tsui Ping North Estate in Kwun Tong. The second stage aims at drawing the 3C line network on the 3D BIM Model so that it can present the walking path of people in different situations. Some selected paths will be used to evaluate its cost and the lowest cost will be considered as the perfect path. In stage three, based on this perfect condition, information will be exported to simulate the walking behavior of people in a different situation. By applying BIM Technology, it can demonstrate the real situation in the computer so as to find out the walking difficulties of people, particularly our targeted group, wheelchair users and the elderly. Likewise, making modifications in the current design, extensions of the walkway or any other possible suggestions will be provided according to the demonstrations so that we can develop a walkable city in the future.
N.A.
HKUST Analysis and Evaluation of Low Carbon Building Features Using Building Information Modeling FYP 06/2018 CHAN, Yin Yee
TSANG, Chun Kit
Building sector contributes to more than 30% of the global greenhouse gas emissions, which is the major source of greenhouse gas emissions. In Hong Kong, a high-rise and high-density city, about 60% of carbon emissions and 90% of energy expenditure come from buildings. Mitigating the environmental impacts caused by the building sector can be achieved by low carbon buildings. However, previous studies on carbon emissions from buildings mainly adopted manual processes and only a few studies applied computational fluid dynamics (CFD) into the analysis and calculated the carbon emissions using the CFD results. Therefore, the comparison between buildings with different features is laborious. Building information modelling (BIM) enables comprehensive and accurate analysis of low carbon building features by collaborating with various simulation systems. By incorporating CFD into the analysis and evaluation of the carbon footprint of different Hong Kong public housing standard blocks using BIM, the research of low carbon building is extended. Revit models of three common Hong Kong public housing blocks are created, and the embodied carbon is quantified by using the material schedules and the corresponding carbon emission factors of different construction materials. The operational carbon is quantified by using the energy simulation results and the CFD results. By considering the total carbon emissions throughout the life-cycle of the buildings, it is found that the harmony block has the lowest carbon emissions among studied public housing standard blocks. When considered the effect of natural ventilation, the energy consumption of the buildings can be reduced up to 17%. N.A.