Complex and tall buildings have been constructed in many cities recently. Fire safety should be a major concern of building designers, engineers, and governments. Previous fire experience has made us understand the importance of acquiring fire-ground information to facilitate firefighting operations, evacuation processes, rescues, etc. Recently, the rapid advancement in Information Technology, Data Analytics, and other detection and monitoring systems has provided the basis for fire safety researchers to re-think fire safety strategies in the built environment. Amongst all fire safety studies, evacuation in tall buildings, including elevator evacuations, has attracted much attention. IoT-aided building fire evacuation is a new concept of the building evacuation mode, which improves the building evacuation process by making decisions of escape based on the real-time fire-ground information, such as the fire environment and occupant situations. Focusing on IoT applications in building fire evacuation, this paper explores the advantages and insufficiencies of current smart building fire evacuation systems. A conceptual design of an IoT-aided building fire evacuation control system is described. The system is introduced in the sequence of information needs, information sources and data transmission, and potential services and applications. Finally, new insights into promising 5G technologies for future building fire evacuations are discussed.

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It is known that organizations can gain a competitive advantage only by managing effectively for today, while simultaneously creating innovation for tomorrow, and sustainability is one of the innovative strategies in major architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) organizations. Innovation is vital to AEC organizations’ growth, yet most do not have a comprehensive measurement of innovation performance. Similar to the balanced scorecard approach, key indicators should be identified for the measuring of innovation performance to facilitate management. This article presents a study by using a triangulation approach that integrates systematic literature reviews and two-step consultations with experienced senior professionals to compile a set of key indicators for innovation performance measures for the AEC Industry.

In recent years, environmentally-friendly, sustainable, and compact development has become increasingly popular with governments. An extensive body of literature has focused on the influence on housing prices from an economic perspective. Although residential urban planning from the perspective of individual needs must be considered, little attention has been paid to residents’ demands in high-density and compact urban areas. In this study, we selected Hong Kong as the case and adopted a reliability interval method to rank residential attitude metrics, which indicated residents’ neighborhood needs in densely populated cities. The influences of location attributes on residents’ demands and residential value were compared. A hedonic price model was used to estimate the impacts of the attributes on housing prices. The results showed that both access to metro stations and median household income had important influences on residents’ preferences and housing prices. However, access to the central business district contributed largely to housing prices but not to residents’ attitudes. These findings support urban planners and policy makers during sustainable residential planning and policy formation by understanding residents’ needs in compact urban areas, help them to optimize the match between housing attributes and residents’ expectations, and balance the relationship between residents’ needs and economic interest.

Staircase evacuation is the major means of fire evacuation for current high-rise residential buildings. However, its feasibility may be questioned as more and more senior citizens live there in the future. The weakness in physical strength and mobility impairment of elderly people may impede the successful implementation of staircase evacuation. It is therefore reasonable to consider using elevators for overall evacuation in high-rise residential buildings. However, enhancing the fire protection of elevators and efficiently controlling the elevator-aided evacuation operations are two major difficulties for applying elevators in building fire evacuation. Recently, the use of smart control for building facility management has become a hot issue in built environment studies. An enabling solution for smart elevator-aided building fire evacuation (SEABFE) is proposed in this article. The solution supports the SEABFE by determining the safer and more efficient elevator-aided evacuation strategy based on real-time fire ground and evacuation progress on the scene. A simulated case study of fire evacuation in a typical high-rise residential building shows that the proposed SEABFE can be successfully performed. Apart from keeping the elevator operation safe, the planned elevator-aided evacuation strategy may save 38.0% of the time compared with the strategy using only staircases in the scene.