This study investigates the spatial effects of the service frequency and transport interchange facilities of rail stations on residential property values for the entire metropolitan train network in Melbourne. Residential properties are classified as either detached or attached dwellings. Given that a traditional hedonic price model cannot handle the spatial dependence and spatial non-stationarity of the housing market, several geographically weighted regression (GWR) models are used and multicollinearity is considered; the model with the Euclidean distance metric outperforms others. Results indicate that the service frequency and facilities of the stations influence the residential property values in a spatially variable way. For every 1 km closer to the train stations, an increase in the frequency of the train services per unit results in a change in the residential property values ranging from −4.01% to 2.71%; an improvement in the transport interchange facilities per unit results in a change in the residential property values ranging from −29.93% to 47.04%. Crime and retail activities that indirectly affect the relationship between rail stations and residential property values are also identified. For every 1 km closer to the train stations, the crime density increases significantly from 5.64% to 42.88% and this occurs in one-fifth of the areas in Melbourne. In contrast, the relationship between retail activities and train stations remains spatially stable. This study complements the relatively scarce literature on the link between railway service levels and residential property values while extending the case study to the local level.

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Purpose Construction industrialization is emerging in the construction industry, as a result, buildings with prefabricated assemblies are gaining more and more ground. In most situations, the prefabricated building assemblies are installed by labor crews manually. If some assemblies are ill-designed, clashes between labor crews’ workspaces and them may occur, which will have bad effect on workers’ productivity and even incur hazard. The purpose of this paper is to provide a 4D building information modeling (BIM) based approach to find potential workspace conflicts during the installation process of prefabricated building assemblies in the detailed design process so as to eliminate them in advance. Design/methodology/approach First, a workspace modeling method is provided; second, three kinds of workspace conflicts are analyzed; third, a 4D-BIM-based approach is established; fourth, a prototype tool based on the approach is developed; and finally, a case study is conducted to test the tool. Findings The result shows that the proposed tool can detect or precaution workspace conflicts and visualize them in a series of views; in doing so, valuable information can be obtained for improving the design quality of prefabricated assemblies. Research limitations/implications The proposed approach and tool only concern the congestions caused by ill-designed prefabricated components; the tool needed to be further optimized for speed; the tests on the tool are limited to a single case study; and more tests are needed to verify its effectiveness. Originality/value This research provides a 4D-BIM-based approach and a prototype tool for installation workspace analysis. It can be used to provide support for design optimization of prefabricated building assemblies.

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A Cu–Ni bimetallic coating was synthesised by an electroplating method. With this design, the Cu–Ni bimetallic coating achieves significant improvements in the cycling life (>1500 hours) and coulombic efficiency (99.46%).