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

Keyword

Below Information is provided by the Higher Insitutions signed MoU with CIC.

Institution

Type

Date: From

To

Institution Title Type Date Author(s) Abstract Link
HKUST Modeling of the indoor/outdoor exchange of air pollutants for the selected building with the aid of building information modeling technology FYP 06/2018 CHAN, Chun Tat
LUI, Kin Leung
TANG, Chloe
As with many other metropolitan cities, air pollution is an acute problem in Hong Kong; by affecting the health of its citizens, it affects the health care system and thus imposes economic burden. In 2015, air pollution led to 2,100 premature deaths and a resultant economic loss of HKD 27 billion. While people’s exposure to air pollutants differs in location and their respective activities, the critical occasions when they are exposed to the greatest amount of air pollutants remain ambiguous. Authorities have been attempting to tackle this problem by scrutinising big data to provide real-time estimations of individuals’ exposure to key air pollutants. A crucial element that enables such technology is the capability of obtaining the pollutant concentrations of different indoor-microenvironments based on the outdoor air quality. This paper reports an ongoing study on the simulation of the indoor/outdoor exchange of air pollutants with the aid of Building Information Modelling technology (BIM), followed by computational fluid dynamics simulations. The Exchange Tower in Kowloon Bay was selected as representative of a typical Hong Kong office building; its daily operation and building systems were analysed and evaluated. The results revealed that indoor environments can be described by their temperature and flow fields, which are highly related. The interdependency of these two variables means that the flow field can be derived once sufficient information on the temperature field can be gathered. This is crucial as the dispersion of air pollutants greatly depends on the characteristic of the flow field. In terms of buildings’ operation and management, a properly designed, well-mixed air distribution system was found to be effective in reducing local concentration of inert air pollutants. It was also energy efficient whilst providing comfort to the building occupants. This implies that regulations on improving building systems and monitoring the resulting indoor air quality could reduce people’s exposure to air pollutants and thereby alleviate the associated impacts and their corollaries. N.A.
HKUST Optimizing lift operations and vessel transport schedules for disassembly of multiple offshore platforms using BIM and GIS Journal 06/2018 Tan, Y., Song, Y., Zhu, J., Long, Q., Wang, X., and Cheng, J.C.P. As the coming decades will witness a big trend in the decommissioning of offshore platforms, simultaneously disassembling topsides of multiple offshore platforms is getting increasingly common. Considering high risk and cost of offshore operations, module lift planning among multiple offshore platforms with transport vessels is required to be carefully conducted. The lift planning usually contains two main parts: module layout on vessels planning and vessel transport schedules arrangement. In contrast to the current experience-driven module lift planning, this paper formulates the lift planning optimization problem and develops a web system integrating building information modeling (BIM) and geographical information system (GIS) to efficiently disassemble topsides for multiple offshore platforms. BIM provides detailed information required for planning module layout on vessels and GIS contains the management and analysis of geospatial information for the vessel transport schedule arrangement. As for module layout optimization, three heuristic algorithms, namely genetic algorithm (GA), particle swarm optimization (PSO), and firefly algorithm (FA) are implemented and compared to obtain the module layout with the minimum total lift time. While for vessel transport schedule, graph search technique is integrated with a developed schedule clash detection function to obtain the transport schedule with the minimum sailing time. The proposed optimization algorithms and techniques are integrated into a developed BIM/GIS-based web system. An example of three offshore platforms with eighteen modules in total is used to illustrate the developed system. Results show that the developed system can significantly improve the efficiency of lift planning in multiple topsides disassembly. The developed BIM/GIS-based web system is also effective and practical in the resource allocation and task assignment among multiple locations, such as construction sites, buildings, and even cities. Link
HKUST Construction Planning of Prefabricated Units Leveraging BIM and Resource Leveling Techniques FYP 06/2018 WONG, Kok Yiu
YEUNG, Ching Hei
As a compact city with limited amount of available land and vast population, Hong Kong is currently facing the massive demand for housing. This phenomenon has been driving the construction industry to enhance the productivity of construction projects, particularly for residential buildings. In recent years, the Hong Kong government has been investigating the feasibility of Modular Integrated Construction (MIC). MIC refers to a construction method where volumetric modules are prefabricated in factories and then assembled at a construction site to form a building. The productivity of this method has been demonstrated by numerous projects in foreign countries, such as Singapore and China. In view of the proven benefits of MIC, the Hong Kong government has proposed three pilot projects recently, which will adopt MIC to construct resident buildings. However, the local industry possesses insufficient experience in managing this kind of construction projects. This report presents an optimization framework, which integrates Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Building Information Modeling (BIM) to perform resource leveling based on constraints of a MIC project. An illustrative case demonstrates the functionalities of GA and BIM in optimizing the schedule of a MIC project. The proposed framework aims to provide the industry practitioners with a general guideline for scheduling a MIC project. N.A.
HKUST A financial decision making framework for construction projects based on 5D building information modeling (BIM) Journal 12/2015 Lu, Q., Won, J., and Cheng, J.C.P. Analyzing cash flows and undertaking project financing are important for contractors in managing construction projects. Traditional methods for cash flow analysis are based on the manual integration of time and cost information. However, the manual integration process can be automated by using five-dimensional building information modeling (5D BIM). Previous studies on 5D BIM have focused on estimating cash outflow rather than cash inflow analysis and project financing. This paper proposes a BIM-based methodology framework for cash flow analysis and project financing. The framework considers contract types and retainage to estimate cash inflow, and cash outflow patterns for equipment, manpower, and materials in order to more accurately measure cash outflow. Project financing scenarios can also be evaluated using the framework. Illustrative examples are demonstrated to validate the proposed framework by considering two what-if scenarios. Results show that the framework can help contractors analyze the cash flow and make appropriate decisions for different design and payment scheme alternatives in construction projects. Link
HKUST BIM-based framework for automatic scheduling of facility maintenance work orders Journal 03/2018 Chen, W., Chen, K., Cheng, J.C.P., Wang, Q., and Gan, V.J.L. Although more than 65% of the total cost in facility management (FM) comes from facility maintenance management (FMM), there is a lack of efficient maintenance strategies and right decision making approaches to reduce FMM costs. Building information modeling (BIM) has been developed as a potential technology for FMM in buildings. This study proposes an FMM framework based on BIM and facility management systems (FMSs), which can provide automatic scheduling of maintenance work orders (MWOs) to enhance good decision making in FMM. In this framework, data are mapped between BIM and FMSs according to the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) extension of maintenance tasks and MWO information in order to achieve data integration. After bi-directional data transmission between the BIM models and FMSs, work order information is visualized in BIM via API to identify components that have failed. Second, geometric and semantic information of the failure components is extracted from the BIM models to calculate the sub-optimal maintenance path in the BIM environment. Third, the MWO schedule is automatically generated using a modified Dijkstra algorithm that considers four factors, namely, problem type, emergency level, distance among components, and location. Illustrative examples are given in the paper to validate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed framework in indoor and outdoor 3D environments. Link
HKUST Optimization of HVAC Systems for Improved Indoor Air Quality and Occupant Thermal Comfort Using a BIM-Supported Computational Approach FYP 06/2020 CHEUNG, Hing
SO, Wai Hin
Air pollution problems are getting more serious and rapid in recent years. Its impacts affect us greatly in many aspects like climate changes, causing health problems and the consequences of increasing the economic burden. In 2016, there is an estimated 4.2 million premature deaths caused by bad air quality in the world. Instead of the long-term exposure effects, short term exposure to air pollutants such as PM10 and NOx will also be irritant to people which cause sneezing, headaches and dizziness, etc. Therefore, there is an urgent need to seek methods to alleviate the problems. However, the effects of air pollutions to the people cannot be determined simply since the amount of air pollutants will be different in different locations and time. To tackle this problem, it is suggested to analyze the data provided by the real-time estimation of people’s exposure to the air pollutants. Based on a given indoor environment with different HVAC components, the indoor air quality can be simulated by the aid of Building Information Technology (BIM) and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). Hence, the simulation result can be interpreted and used for the optimization of HVAC systems for a better indoor air quality (IAQ).

This report presents the research conducted on the application of BIM to HVAC systems for optimizing the IAQ. Analysis of the application of BIM and the detailed operation of HVAC systems to explore how BIM-supported computational approach can optimize HVAC systems for improved indoor and thermal occupant comfort (Aktiengesellschaft). TAL building in Jordan was selected as the target area of this report and act as an example. The site visit of the building is conducted and its daily operation and building systems are analyzed and evaluated. After that, building of BIM model of TAL building has started. With the usage of Autodesk Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), we tried to simulate the actual indoor environment of TAL building. Before running the simulation, the calculating of different boundary conditions of the model and the construction of BIM model in CFD are conducted. The process of them will be described in this report. After reporting the progress, the result of simulation will be shown and further analysis and evaluation will be conducted through the interpretation of the simulation results.
N.A.