Lingli Huang

Prefabricated installation, a pivotal study in the realm of contemporary construction practices, delves into the utilization of prefabrication within mechanical, electrical, and plumbing (MEP) systems. Despite its ascending prominence, the domain grapples with ambiguities in application pathways, uncertain developmental trajectories, and the absence of a holistic technical paradigm. This research endeavors to bridge these gaps by conducting a thorough and multidimensional investigation into the current landscape of prefabricated MEP installation initiatives. This study meticulously dissects the paradigm from five critical vantage points: historical evolution, standards and regulations, life cycle analysis, technological applications, and corporate implementation strategies. At present, there is still a lack of standards and specifications specifically for the field of assembled MEP installation. The analysis reveals a trend towards intelligent and sustainable installation practices in prefabricated MEP projects. The research predominantly focuses on the design, production, and installation stages. Notably, building information modeling (BIM) emerges as the most prominent technology, followed by the Internet of Things (IoT) and 3D laser scanning, with extended reality (XR) technologies gaining traction. Large, state-owned construction firms are spearheading innovative applications in this realm. In summary, this paper provides an overview and outlook for the development direction and the application of cutting-edge technologies in prefabricated MEP installation projects, with the aim of supporting the industry’s advancement.

There are usually multiple functional spaces that meet different usage needs on each building floor. The number of people in different functional spaces varies, resulting in an uneven distribution of people on each floors. When the building is subject to hazards, users inside buildings usually evacuate to safe areas through safety exits. Obviously, when the exit location is close to the crowded area, more people can be evacuated as quickly as possible. However, existing methods for optimizing exit locations of buildings mainly by shortening evacuation paths with limited considerations of the dynamic distributions of evacuees. Since the ontology has semantic description capability and reasonability. Therefore, the ontology is used to organize the design information related to the optimization of exit locations. The rules are further set to reason about the distribution of evacuees and the optimal exit location. Therefore, a design optimization method for exit locations based on BIM and ontology is proposed. Firstly, the ontology is developed to describe the information needed for design optimization. Then, the plan layout information is extracted from BIM as ontology instances. Next, based on the evacuation simulations, the exit location optimization strategies were created for the different distribution of evacuees, and the strategies were translated into SWRL rules. Finally, the ontology instance and SWRL rules are combined to reason about the exit location optimization strategies for specific projects. Therefore, this study provided the exit location optimization strategies to make the evacuation time shorter by considering the distribution of evacuees. The automation of exit location reasoning is further enhanced by using the constructed ontology to organize the design information and by transforming the optimization strategies into SWRL rules. The feasibility of the method was verified using several cases. By comparing the evacuation time of people under the exit location recommended by this method and the exit location designed by the shortest evacuation path, it is concluded that the method proposed in this paper takes into account the distribution of people in the plane and the evacuation time is shorter.

Compliance checking on the topological spatial relationships of building elements is vital for ensuring the safety and the quality of buildings. However, the complex topological spatial relationships of buildings are not usually expressed in the design scheme directly. Manual checking is still needed to analyze the design scheme and extract the spatial relationships. Such manual checking is always time consuming and prone to error. Therefore, this study has proposed a compliance checking method based on a building information model (BIM) and building ontologies for the automatic checking of topological spatial relationships. Firstly, the topological spatial relationships are well captured and represented according to the location relation of building elements. The checking rules are further established based on regulations. Then, the design information is extracted from the design model, mainly including the location information of building elements. Next, the review ontology is developed, and the design information is organized based on the ontology. Finally, the checking is completed based on the ontology and checking rules. The authors have validated the proposed method through a case study. The results show that the proposed method could help to achieve automatic compliance checking on topological spatial relationships of building elements.

Safe and effective construction management requires tools for reducing delays, eliminating reworks, and avoiding accidents. Unfortunately, challenges still exist in current construction practices for enabling real-time interactions among project participants, field discoveries, and massive data. Extended reality (i.e., XR) could help to establish immersive and interactive virtual environments that enable real-time information exchange among humans, cyber processes, and physical environments during construction. However, limited studies have synthesized potentials, challenges, and scenarios of XR for ensuring construction safety and efficiency. This study provides a critical review that synthesizes XR in construction management. First, the authors used the PRISMA method to screen studies related to XR in construction management. Seventy-nine studies were selected and comprehensively analyzed. The authors conducted a bibliometric analysis to comprehend the spatiotemporal distributions of the selected studies. Then, the selected studies were classified into three categories: (1) progress control, (2) quality control, and (3) safety management. The authors also synthesized information for XR applications in various construction management scenarios and summarized the challenges related to XR applications. Finally, this review shed light on future research directions of XR for safe and effective construction management.

Intelligent construction and management processes are essential to ensure the efficiency of planting and maintenance of landscapes in large-scale projects. Unfortunately, various challenges still exist for achieving such a vision. For instance, creating detailed models of various plants to precisely capture the spatiotemporal changes is challenging. Moreover, transmitting massive plant-related data in time for project coordination and remote maintenance is also difficult through traditional landscape management practices. Integrated use of building information modeling (BIM) and mixed reality (MR) techniques could help establish digital representations of various plants with semantic information. Such integration of BIM and MR offers instinctual interactions by blending the physical and digital worlds. This study proposed an intelligent construction and management framework through BIM and MR to (1) establish detailed models of various plants, (2) capture spatiotemporal changes of plants across four seasons for model updating, and (3) establish a real-time data transmission method for effective project coordination and remote maintenance of various plants. The authors used the Jinhu Park project in the Xiong’an New District of China as a case study to validate the proposed method. Results show that the proposed method could support the sustainable development of landscapes in real practice.