Infrastructure Engineering - Research Publications

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    A BIM-based framework for property dispute minimization - A case study for Victoria, Australia
    Shin, J ; Rajabifard, A ; Kalantari, M ; Atazadeh, B (ELSEVIER SCI LTD, 2022-08)
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    A Framework for Scaling Urban Transformative Resilience through Utilizing Volunteered Geographic Information
    Moghadas, M ; Rajabifard, A ; Fekete, A ; Koetter, T (MDPI, 2022-02)
    Resilience in the urban context can be described as a continuum of absorptive, adaptive, and transformative capacities. The need to move toward a sustainable future and bounce forward after any disruption has led recent urban resilience initiatives to engage with the concept of transformative resilience when and where conventional and top-down resilience initiatives are less likely to deliver effective strategies, plans, and implementable actions. Transformative resilience pathways emphasize the importance of reflexive governance, inclusive co-creation of knowledge, innovative and collaborative learning, and self-organizing processes. To support these transformative pathways, considering techno-social co-evolution and digital transformation, using new data sources such as Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) and crowdsourcing are being promoted. However, a literature review on VGI and transformative resilience reveals that a comprehensive understanding of the complexities and capacities of utilizing VGI for transformative resilience is lacking. Therefore, based on a qualitative content analysis of available resources, this paper explores the key aspects of using VGI for transformative resilience and proposes a comprehensive framework structured around the identified legal, institutional, social, economic, and technical aspects to formalize the process of adopting VGI in transformative resilience initiatives.
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    Editorial: Geospatial Understanding of Sustainable Urban Analytics Using Remote Sensing
    Sabri, S ; Rajabifard, A ; Chen, Y ; Chen, N ; Sheng, H (MDPI, 2022-06)
    The increasing trend of urbanization has challenged the traditional ways of urban planning, design, and management [...]
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    Data lifecycle of underground land administration: a systematic literature review
    Saeidian, B ; Rajabifard, A ; Atazadeh, B ; Kalantari, M (Taylor and Francis Group, 2022)
    Underground Land Administration (ULA) plays a paramount role in recording, registering and managing underground ownership boundaries and rights, restrictions and responsibilities associated with underground assets. 3D digital models provide a great potential to modernise ULA as it is evident in research studies. Several steps, from data acquisition to the use of underground land data have been considered by studies to support 3D ULA. These steps form the ULA data lifecycle. This paper provides an overview of methods, techniques and tools used in different steps of the ULA data lifecycle and identifies research gaps, challenges, and potential opportunities for future studies.
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    Understanding the Characteristics of Pedestrians when Passing Obstacles of Different Sizes: An Experimental Study
    Alhawsawi, AN ; Sarvi, M ; Felemban, E ; Rajabifard, A ; Wang, J (Forschungszentrum Julich, Zentralbibliothek, 2021-10-03)
    The aim of this study is to understand the collective movements of individuals and to observe how individuals interact within a physical environment in a crowd dynamic, which has drawn the attention of many researchers. We conducted an experimental study to observe interactions in the collective motions of people and to identify characteristics of pedestrians when passing obstacles of different sizes (bar-shaped, 1.2 m, 2.4 m, 3.6 m and 4.8 m), going through one narrow exit and employing three different flow rates in walking and running conditions. According to the results of our study, there were no differences in collision-avoidance behaviour of pedestrians when walking or running. The pedestrians reacted early to the obstacles and changed the direction in which they were walking by quickly turning to the left or to the right. In terms of the speed of the pedestrians, the average velocity was significantly affected while performing these tasks, decreasing as the size of the obstacle increased; therefore, the size of obstacles will affect flow and speed levels. Travel time was shorter when participants were in the medium-flow rate experiments. In terms of the distance of each individual’s travel, our data showed that there was no significant difference in all the flow rate experiments for both speed levels. Our results also show that when the pedestrians crossed an obstacle, the lateral distance averaged from 0.3 m to 0.7 m, depending on the flow rate and speed level. We then explored how the body sways behaved while avoiding obstacles. It is observed that the average sway of the body was less in the high-speed conditions compared to the low-speed conditions – except for the HF & 4.8 m experiment. These results are expected to provide an insight into the characteristics of the behaviour of pedestrians when avoiding objects, and this could help enhance agent-based models.
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    Building Information Modeling (BIM) for Construction and Demolition Waste Management in Australia: A Research Agenda
    Han, D ; Kalantari, M ; Rajabifard, A (MDPI, 2021-12)
    Construction and demolition waste (C&DW) contribute to approximately 30% of the total waste generation worldwide, by which heterogeneous ecological impacts, such as resource depletion, global warming, and land degradation, are engendered. Despite ongoing research efforts to minimize construction waste via the Building Information Modeling (BIM)-aided design, there is a paucity of research on integrating BIM in demolition waste management (DWM). This study investigates prominent barriers and future research directions toward the wider adoption of BIM in C&DWM by conducting a systematic literature review. First, this study identifies the barriers that hinder the implementation of C&DWM in Australia; then, it explores the benefits and challenges of leveraging BIM applications for C&DWM. The findings suggest that, for existing buildings without up-to-date design drawings, it is imperative to improve the accuracy of data capturing and object recognition techniques to overcome the bottlenecks of BIM-DWM integration. Moreover, the development of regional-oriented material banks and their harmonization with life cycle assessment databases can extend the potential of BIM-based sustainability analysis, making it applicable to the DWM domain. This study proposes a research agenda on tackling these challenges to realize BIM’s full potential in facilitating DWM.
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    Evaluating the role of partnerships in increasing the use of big Earth data to support the Sustainable Development Goals: an Australian perspective
    Mohamed-Ghouse, ZS ; Desha, C ; Rajabifard, A ; Blicavs, M ; Martin, G (TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2021-11-26)
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    INVERSE MODEL USING LAND AND PROPERTY SUB-SYSTEMS FOR PLANNING FUTURE CITIES: A GENERAL FRAMEWORK
    Crespo, R ; Rajabifard, A (BUCHAREST UNIV PRESS, 2022-02)
    This paper suggests, based on literature review, the use of the inverse model coupled with land and property systems to support urban decision-making. The inverse model is to be used for planning decisions today to achieve the desired tomorrow. This approach has been used previously in urban planning with a property system. The use of a property system alone is insufficient in dealing with the complexity of urban systems. Complex systems are made up of sub-systems that interact with each other; the integration of two sub-systems offers a first and simple alternative to address the complexity of urban systems. We suggest the use of two parametric approaches, logistic regression and house price, to model land and property sub-systems, respectively. Finally, we stress that further studies are needed to integrate the inverse model with other statistical techniques that also deal with complexity, such as cellular automata (CA) or agent-based models.
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    ROOM-BASED ENERGY DEMAND CLASSIFICATION of BIM DATA USING GRAPH SUPERVISED LEARNING
    Kiavarz, H ; Jadidi, M ; Rajabifard, A ; Sohn, G (Copernicus GmbH, 2021-10-07)
    Abstract. Nowadays, cities and buildings are increasingly interconnected with new modern data models like the 3D city model and Building Information Modelling (BIM) for urban management. In the past decades, BIM appears to have been primarily used for visualization. However, BIM has been recently used for a wide range of applications, especially in Building Energy Consumption Estimation (BECE). Despite extensive research, BIM is less used in BECE data-driven approaches due to its complexity in the data model and incompatibility with machine learning algorithms. Therefore, this paper highlights the potential opportunity to apply graph-based learning algorithms (e.g., GraphSAGE) using the enriched semantic, geometry, and room topology information extracted from BIM data. The preliminary results are demonstrated a promising avenue for BECE analysis in both pre-construction step (design) and post-construction step like retrofitting processes.
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    Remote Sensing and Meteorological Data Fusion in Predicting Bushfire Severity: A Case Study from Victoria, Australia
    Sharma, SK ; Aryal, J ; Rajabifard, A (MDPI AG, 2022-04-01)
    The extent and severity of bushfires in a landscape are largely governed by meteorological conditions. An accurate understanding of the interactions of meteorological variables and fire behaviour in the landscape is very complex, yet possible. In exploring such understanding, we used 2693 high-confidence active fire points recorded by a Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensor for nine different bushfires that occurred in Victoria between 1 January 2009 and 31 March 2009. These fires include the Black Saturday Bushfires of 7 February 2009, one of the worst bushfires in Australian history. For each fire point, 62 different meteorological parameters of bushfire time were extracted from Bureau of Meteorology Atmospheric high-resolution Regional Reanalysis for Australia (BARRA) data. These remote sensing and meteorological datasets were fused and further processed in assessing their relative importance using four different tree-based ensemble machine learning models, namely, Random Forest (RF), Fuzzy Forest (FF), Boosted Regression Tree (BRT), and Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost). Google Earth Engine (GEE) and Landsat images were used in deriving the response variable–Relative Difference Normalised Burn Ratio (RdNBR), which was selected by comparing its performance against Difference Normalised Burn Ratio (dNBR). Our findings demonstrate that the FF algorithm utilising the Weighted Gene Coexpression Network Analysis (WGCNA) method has the best predictive performance of 96.50%, assessed against 10-fold cross-validation. The result shows that the relative influence of the variables on bushfire severity is in the following order: (1) soil moisture, (2) soil temperature, (3) air pressure, (4) air temperature, (5) vertical wind, and (6) relative humidity. This highlights the importance of soil meteorology in bushfire severity analysis, often excluded in bushfire severity research. Further, this study provides a scientific basis for choosing a subset of meteorological variables for bushfire severity prediction depending on their relative importance. The optimal subset of high-ranked variables is extremely useful in constructing simplified and computationally efficient surrogate models, which can be particularly useful for the rapid assessment of bushfire severity for operational bushfire management and effective mitigation efforts.