No abstract

Injuries and fatalities resulting from workplace accidents remain a global concern within the construction industry. While education and training of personnel offer well known approaches for establishing a safe work environment, Serious Games in Virtual Reality (VR) is being increasingly investigated as a complementary approach for learning. They yet have to take full advantage of the inherent data that can be collected about players. This research presents a novel approach for the automated assessment of players' data. The proposed method gathers and processes the data within a serious game for instant personalized feedback. The application focuses on close calls and contact collisions between construction workers and hazards like equipment, harmful substances, or restricted work zones. The results demonstrate the benefits and limitations of safety information previously unavailable, or very hard or impossible to collect. An outlook presents work ahead for practical implementation in existing risk management processes.

-Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are an established utility for remote sensing and mapping purposes. Practical applications emerge in the form of inspecting structures that are hard to reach, deterioration analysis, construction monitoring or quantifying material in landfills. From a technological perspective most of these applications rely on the same established method, manual piloting by experts. While ongoing research is focused on developing reliable means of obstacle avoidance, sophisticated mission planning solutions can greatly increase the practicality of UAVs for inspection purposes. We propose an inspection planning concept for highly automated inspections in BIM projects. The application, developed in the course of this research, interacts with the firmware and the simulation capabilities of the Dronekit framework, which makes for a highly integrated and sustainable UAV. The main contribution is the 3D simulation of planned flight missions with Software-In-The-Loop (SITL) technology. The inclusion of actual flight dynamics allows the operator to perceive an authentic representation of the UAV's behaviour before take-off. Furthermore, the webbased planning application renders preview images in the virtual scene which provide a realistic impression of the results to be expected. The application automatically generates the different waypoints for obtaining photographs of a Point of Interest (PoI).

Drawbacks of the absence of the flow view in the conventional construction logistics planning gain more attention. Inefficiency and wastes (e.g., on-site overstock) in the construction logistics caused by adopting an avoidance strategy is recognized. Meanwhile, the unstable labour productivity and periodic planning method cause difficulties for adopting Just-in-Time (JIT) approach in construction. As a real-time control system of a production flow with the ability of rapid and precise acquisition of facts, the Kanban system can be a solution for a pulled production and related logistics. This paper explores how to apply Kanban concept to record the material consumption, report the real-time demand and trigger a material replenishment from off-site to onsite. A methodology of designing and applying Kanban batch in the digital construction logistics with Building Information Modelling (BIM) systems or tools is proposed. A case study of an infrastructure project is carried out to address the functions and performance of a Kanban-triggered material replenishment. The results of the case study show significant savings of site storage area and construction time by applying Kanban concept in the construction logistics.

The process of generating optimized schedules for construction projects is a very time-consuming. For each construction task several execution restrictions, conditions and requirements such as technological dependencies or resource availabilities have to be considered. This leads to a multitude of possible execution orders and consequently to a hard optimization problem. Within this paper the integration of a flexible Simulated Annealing metaheuristic into a constraint-based simulation concept is presented to determine optimized construction schedules. Simulated Annealing approximates the optimized solution by defined temperatures and cooling rates. Both parameters help to define the search process and respectively help to escape from local minima. In the following the Simulated Annealing approach and its implementation are described in detail. Furthermore, the application of Simulated Annealing is demonstrated using an example from construction scheduling.