No abstract

Innovative solutions for rapid and intelligent survey and assessment methods are required in maintenance, repair, retrofit and rebuild of enormous numbers of bridges in service throughout the world. Motivated by this need, a next-generation integrated bridge inspection system, called SeeBridge, has been proposed. An Information Delivery Manual (IDM) was compiled to specify the technical components, activities and information exchanges in the SeeBridge process, and a Model View Definition (MVD) was prepared to specify the data exchange schema to serve the IDM. The MVD was bound to the IFC4 Add2 data schema standard. The IDM and MVD support research and development of the system by rigorously defining the information and data that structure bridge engineers' knowledge. The SeeBridge process is mapped, parts of the data repositories are presented, and the future use of the IDM is discussed. The development underlines the real potential for automated inspection of infrastructure at large, because it demonstrates that the hurdles in the way of automated acquisition of detailed and semantically rich models of existing infrastructure are computational in nature, not instrumental, and are surmountable with existing technologies.

Semantic enrichment of building models adds meaningful domain-specific or application-specific information to a digital building model. It is applicable to solving interoperability problems and to compilation of models from point cloud data. The SeeBIM (Semantic Enrichment Engine for BIM) prototype software encapsulates domain expert knowledge in computer readable rules for inference of object types, identity and aggregation of systems. However, it is limited to axis-aligned bounding box geometry and the adequacy of its rule-sets cannot be guaranteed. This paper solves these drawbacks by (1) devising a new procedure for compiling inference rule sets that are known a priori to be adequate for complete and thorough classification of model objects, and (2) enhancing the operators to compute complex geometry and enable precise topological rule processing. The procedure for compiling adequate rule sets is illustrated using a synthetic concrete highway bridge model. A real-world highway bridge model, with 333 components of 13 different types and compiled from a laser scanned point cloud, is used to validate the approach and test the enhanced SeeBIM system. All of the elements are classified correctly, demonstrating the efficacy of the approach to semantic enrichment.

BIM has been widely used in project management, but on the whole the applications have been scattered and the BIM models have not been deployed throughout the whole project life-cycle. Each participant builds their own BIM, so there is a major problem in how to integrate these dynamic and fragmented data together. In order to solve this problem, this paper focuses on BIM-based life-cycle information management and builds a framework for BIM-enabled life-cycle information management. To organize the life-cycle information well, the information components and information flow during the project life-cycle are defined. Then, the application of BIM in life-cycle information management is analysed. This framework will provide a unified platform for information management and ensure data integrity.

The COVID-19 pandemic has put labor-intensive industries at risk, among which the construction industry is a typical one. Practitioners in the construction industry are facing high probabilities of COVID-19 transmission, while their knowledge, attitudes, and practices (KAP) are critical to the prevention of virus spread. This study seeks to investigate the KAP of construction industry practitioners in China through an online questionnaire survey conducted from 15 to 30 June 2020. A total of 702 effective responses were received and analyzed. The results revealed that: (1) although an overwhelming percentage of respondents had the correct knowledge about COVID-19, there were significant respondents (15% of all) who were unsure or wrong about the human-to-human transmission of the virus; (2) practitioners generally showed an optimistic attitude about winning the battle against the COVID-19 pandemic and were satisfied with the governments' contingency measures; (3) practitioners tended to actively take preventive measures, although checking body temperature, wearing face masks, and keeping safe social distance still needs to be reinforced. This research is among the first to identify the KAP of construction industry practitioners toward the COVID-19 pandemic in China. Results presented here have implications for enhancing strategies to reduce and prevent COVID-19 spread in the construction industry.