The subject of the diploma thesis "Management of Construction Projects" is a description of the management process and its' application to a model case. The first part deals with the theoretical structure of project management, construction management and construction project delivery methods. The second part applies the theoretical knowledge to a concrete construction project. Primarily, the benefit analysis is performed for the chosen project delivery methods. Subsequently, the personal proposal for the management process is developed, which incorporates organizational, time, cost, quality and risk components of the project. Finally, the model construction project. is summarized and assessed.

This master's thesis deals with design of application for scheduling projects and time using principles of real time scheduling. In the beginning this thesis describes project management and time management and their principles. In the next chapter are principles and algorithms of scheduling in real time system described. The next chapter deals with design of application for scheduling projects and time using principles of real time scheduling. MVC design pattern is described in following chapter.Implementation of tool is desribed in next-to-last chapter a the last chapter is devoted to use cases of final tool.

This thesis deals with preparation and management of construction order. In the theoretical part there is described the definition of the term project, then management of project and leadership. In the practical part the investor and the contractor of the construction order will be introduced. This construction order is evaluated, then an organization structure, costs plan, time schedule and site accommodation are made. In the final part the thesis deals with evaluation of results and its comparison with the building company.

<p>We make decisions every day, some with the potential for a huge impact on our lives. This process of decision-making is crucial not only for individuals but for industries, including construction. Unlike the manufacturing industry, where one can make certain decisions regarding an actual product by looking at it in real time, the nature of construction is different. Here, decisions are to be made on a product which will be built somewhere in the near future. The complex and interim nature of construction projects, along with factors like time essence, increasing scale of projects and multitude of stakeholders, makes it even more difficult to reach consensus. Incorporating VR can aid in getting an insight on the final product at the very beginning of the project life cycle. With a visual representation, the stakeholders involved can collaborate on a single platform to assess the project, share common knowledge and make choices that would produce better results in all major aspects like cost, quality, time and safety. This study aims at assessing decision-making in the earlier stages of construction and then evaluating the performance of immersive and non-immersive VR platforms.</p> <br> <p> </p>

This paper addresses a new conceptual framework for a communitybased project management learning model that aims to support learning within a project and enhance the distribution of knowledge within a particular virtual community. This model also aims to develop a virtual community of doctoral students, who can manage their own projects online with other community members who have the same interest. In order to develop that model, a checklist of community-based project management process has been developed in the light of the literature review and the needs of stakeholders (doctoral students and researchers). Within this model, community-based project management includes three main elements: community, project and management. In relation to project, there are two main sub elements. First is projectbased learning (PBL), which is based on constructivist perspective of learning that make students construct their knowledge when they work together to accomplish specific goals. Second is the project management body of knowledge (PMBOK), which is a project management guide, and an internationally recognized standard [PMBOK Guide, 2004], that provides the fundamentals of project management as they apply to a wide range of projects, including construction, software, engineering, automotive, so the study deploy this approach to scaffold based project management learning model. In the terms of the community element, this study adopted the community of inquiry model, which defines a good e-learning environment through three major aspects: cognitive presence, social presence and teaching presence. The last element which is addressed in this study called knowledge management. After identifying these elements, this study investigates a range of tools in the light of this model. The study analyses six different learning and content management systems (OPAL, Moodle, Joomla, e107, ZMS and TUDWCMS) in order to find out tool(s) that is/are sufficient for implementing the suggested study model.

<p>  </p> <p>Available literature indicated that construction projects have been experiencing significant time overruns from their planned duration. In many cases, the primary reasons for project delays were ineffective planning and scheduling methods, poor communication and collaboration between the key stakeholders, and the construction operations and task requirements have been overlooked.</p> <p>Construction project planning and scheduling are extensively studied topics, and several techniques have been developed to solve construction project scheduling problems. Traditional production planning and scheduling techniques are based on the push planning strategy, such as linear and network scheduling techniques. In the traditional method, the project scheduler calculates activity durations and then sequences them to determine when to complete the work. These techniques and planning methods have been criticized for lacking collaboration between project workers and realistic integration of the project time, location, and other essential resources to create a reliable work schedule. Furthermore, the inability to account for site operations, tasks, and workflow leads to waste and delay. </p> <p>Consequently, Ballard and Howell (1990) proposed the last planner system, and then Ballard et al. (2000) further developed the method. In the last planner system, all key stakeholders and the project management team actively communicate and coordinate to accomplish the project’s planned milestones. The last planner system and pull planning scheduling objective is improving workflow and increasing plan reliability. However, the pull planning scheduling method has some limitations. For instance, this method cannot be used to determine the available work capacity in each working space and show how much work can be completed at a given time. In addition, the pull planning and LPS system are highly descriptive and experienced-based, relying on the decision and experiences of the site supervisors. </p> <p>Available literature concerning construction project delay also indicated that ineffective planning and scheduling, slow decision-making, and poor communication and coordination had been the top critical causes of construction project delay.</p> <p>Therefore, this research was conducted to minimize construction project time and cost overrun due to poor scheduling and production planning. The study has been conducted in two main parts. In the first part of this study, critical causes of project delay have been analyzed, and the contribution of poor planning and scheduling to construction project delays in different environments has been assessed. The relative importance index and Spearman’s coefficient techniques have been utilized to analyze the collected data.  The second section of this research work was conducted to investigate the construction scheduling reliability and production efficiency and developed the enhanced production planning and scheduling method to improve schedule reliability and production plan efficiency.  The reason for developing the enhanced production planning and scheduling method was to find the best work option to optimize work duration and efficiently plan required resources per category of the identified activities. In addition, this study has automated the scheduling input data capturing from the project BIM model by utilizing the developed visual program.</p> <p>The study finding in the first section indicated that the top ten critical causes of identified causes of project delay in specified environments were significantly different. However, Ineffective project planning and scheduling had been among the most critical causes in all three conditions. Ineffective planning and scheduling were ranked number one in developed environment conditions, second in developing countries, and fifth in high-risk environments.</p> <p>Study results in the second section have shown that the case study's executed schedule had experienced significant changes in the planned dates of individual tasks, project milestones, and resource allocation. The project schedule critical path and critical activities were changed repeatedly after each update, and the project structure work was delayed for 30 days from its initial plan, as illustrated in figures 33 to 35. Subsequently, the enhanced planning methodology has been applied in the selected case study to validate the developed method and evaluate the result of the case study. The case study implemented work plan has been compared with the enhanced planning-based developed schedule. The total duration of the enhanced planning-based method has been calculated to be 240 work days, which shows 30 days less time from implemented case study plan and 50 days from the project base plan in the construction document, as illustrated in figures 39 to 41. </p> <p>Furthermore, the production schedule sensitivity analysis has shown that the production schedule and the case study base plan tasks duration have not been significantly different since both schedules were created based on the similar size of the work crew, but in terms of the number of the planned task, the production schedule had been created based on the most suitable work option. Another advantage of the production schedule is that it is more reliable because the schedule is created for a shorter duration, not long before the project work starts, and it is created after multiple collaborations and assessment steps. In addition, the developed program in this study using Revit dynamo automated the extraction of input data from the BIM model to create the project schedule. </p> <p>In conclusion, based on the case study results, the enhanced production planning methodology and developed metrics and indices can be applied to various building construction projects to find the most suitable work option and create a reliable and resource-efficient work schedule. </p>

<p dir="ltr">Smart windows, dynamically adjusting optical transmittance, face global adoption challenges due to climatic and economic variability. Aiming these issues, we synthesized a methyl cellulose (MC) salt system with high tunability for intrinsic optical transmittance (89.3%), which can be applied globally to various locations. Specifically, the MC window has superior heat shielding potential below transition temperatures while turning opaque at temperatures above the Lower Critical Solution Temperature (LCST), reducing the solar heat gain by 55%. Such optical tunability is attributable to the particle size change triggered by the temperature-induced reversible coil-to-globular transition. This leads to effective refractive index and scattering modulation, making them prospective solutions for light management systems, an application ahead of intelligent fenestration systems. MC-based windows demonstrated a 9°C temperature decrease compared to double-pane windows on sunny days and a 5°C increase during winters in field tests, while simulations predict an 11% energy savings.</p><p dir="ltr">Incorporating MC-based phase change materials in passive solar panels indicated optimized energy efficiency, offering a sustainable alternative. Real-time simulations validate practical applicability in large-scale solar panels. Furthermore, a temperature-responsive sorbent with a dark layer demonstrates an optimal optical and water uptake performance. Transitioning between radiative cooling and solar heating, the sorbent exhibits high water harvesting efficiency in lab and field tests. With an adjustable LCST at 38 ℃, the cellulose-based sorbent presents a potential solution for atmospheric water harvesting, combining optical switching and temperature responsiveness for sustainable water access. Furthermore, the ubiquitous availability of materials, low cost, and ease-of-manufacturing will provide technological equity and foster our ambition towards net-zero buildings and sustainable future.</p>

<p>  </p> <p>Traditional manual code compliance checking process is a time-consuming, costly, and error-prone process that has many shortcomings (Zhang & El-Gohary, 2015). Therefore, automated code compliance checking systems have emerged as an alternative to traditional code compliance checking. However, computer software cannot directly process regulatory information in unstructured building code texts. To support automated code compliance checking, building codes need to be transformed to a computer-processable, structured format. In particular, the problem that most automated code compliance checking systems can only check a limited number of building code requirements stands out.</p> <p>The transformation of building code requirements into a computer-processable, structured format is a natural language processing (NLP) task that requires highly accurate part-of-speech (POS) tagging results on building codes beyond the state of the art. To address this need, this dissertation research was conducted to provide a method to improve the performance of POS taggers by error-driven transformational rules that revise machine-tagged POS results. The proposed error-driven transformational rules fix errors in POS tagging results in two steps. First, error-driven transformational rules locate errors in POS tagging by their context. Second, error-driven transformational rules replace the erroneous POS tag with the correct POS tag that is stored in the rule. A dataset of POS tagged building codes, namely the Part-of-Speech Tagged Building Codes (PTBC) dataset (Xue & Zhang, 2019), was published in the Purdue University Research Repository (PURR). Testing on the dataset illustrated that the method corrected 71.00% of errors in POS tagging results for building codes. As a result, the POS tagging accuracy on building codes was increased from 89.13% to 96.85%.</p> <p>This dissertation research was conducted to provide a new POS tagger that is tailored to building codes. The proposed POS tagger utilized neural network models and error-driven transformational rules. The neural network model contained a pre-trained model and one or more trainable neural layers. The neural network model was trained and fine-tuned on the PTBC (Xue & Zhang, 2019) dataset, which was published in the Purdue University Research Repository (PURR). In this dissertation research, a high-performance POS tagger for building codes using one bidirectional Long-short Term Memory (LSTM) Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) trainable layer, a BERT-Cased-Base pre-trained model, and 50 epochs of training was discovered. This model achieved 91.89% precision without error-driven transformational rules and 95.11% precision with error-driven transformational rules, outperforming the otherwise most advanced POS tagger’s 89.82% precision on building codes in the state of the art.</p> <p>Other automated information extraction methods were also developed in this dissertation. Some automated code compliance checking systems represented building codes in logic clauses and used pattern matching-based rules to convert building codes from natural language text to logic clauses (Zhang & El-Gohary 2017). A ruleset expansion method that can expand the range of checkable building codes of such automated code compliance checking systems by expanding their pattern matching-based ruleset was developed in this dissertation research. The ruleset expansion method can guarantee: (1) the ruleset’s backward compatibility with the building codes that the ruleset was already able to process, and (2) forward compatibility with building codes that the ruleset may need to process in the future. The ruleset expansion method was validated on Chapters 5 and 10 of the International Building Code 2015 (IBC 2015). The Chapter 10 of IBC 2015 was used as the training dataset and the Chapter 5 of the IBC 2015 was used as the testing dataset. A gold standard of logic clauses was published in the Logic Clause Representation of Building Codes (LCRBC) dataset (Xue & Zhang, 2021). Expanded pattern matching-based rules were published in the dissertation (Appendix A). The expanded ruleset increased the precision, recall, and f1-score of the logic clause generation at the predicate-level by 10.44%, 25.72%, and 18.02%, to 95.17%, 96.60%, and 95.88%, comparing to the baseline ruleset, respectively. </p> <p>Most of the existing automated code compliance checking research focused on checking regulatory information that was stored in textual format in building code in text. However, a comprehensive automated code compliance checking process should be able to check regulatory information stored in other parts, such as, tables. Therefore, this dissertation research was conducted to provide a semi-automated information extraction and transformation method for tabular information processing in building codes. The proposed method can semi-automatically detect the layouts of tables and store the extracted information of a table in a database. Automated code compliance checking systems can then query the database for regulatory information in the corresponding table. The algorithm’s initial implementation accurately processed 91.67 % of the tables in the testing dataset composed of tables in Chapter 10 of IBC  2015. After iterative upgrades, the updated method correctly processed all tables in the testing dataset. </p>

<p dir="ltr">Work from home (WFH) moves work into home life, reshaping the residential, workplace, and commuting activities, which further impacts greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Although existing work has explored individual time-use patterns under WFH, there is a lack of complete consideration of diverse activities, their durations and timelines, as well as the comparisons with traditional life at home and Work in Office (WIO). Also, existing studies have examined GHG emissions under WFH, while individual-level estimation using activity-specific data covering all major activities is lacking. In particular, limited studies explored individual time-use patterns and quantified activity-based emissions for the construction workforce. Therefore, this dissertation aims to (1) develop an activity-based individual-level model to estimate GHG emissions under WFH, (2) compare individual time-use patterns and activity-based GHG emissions between traditional life at home, WFH, and WIO to understand how WFH affects work, life, and the environment, especially for the construction workforce, and (3) propose activity-based decarbonization strategies to reduce GHG emissions. By employing the proposed model, high-resolution calculations of individual time-use patterns and activity-based emissions were achieved, revealing major activities’ durations and timing and highlighting major contributing activities to emissions under WFH. When shifting from traditional life at home to WFH, individuals reduced sleeping and leisure hours to incorporate work activity, resulting in an 11.34% reduction in GHG emissions. When comparing WFH to WIO, individuals reduced work and commuting time to include more cooking and leisure activities at home, mitigating GHG emissions by 29.11%. Demographic groups and climate regions showed different results mainly because of the varied work and household duties and the characteristics of regions. In addition, the construction workforce reduced GHG emissions by 13% and 46% under WFH compared to traditional life at home and WIO, respectively. Compared to the general public, the construction workforce had more reduction in work and commuting hours and associated emissions when shifting from WIO to WFH. The findings could help envision how WFH influences work, life, and the environment as well as assist both individuals and policymakers in achieving decarbonization and adopting low-carbon living during the work arrangement transition, which could contribute to sustainable development.</p>

The main goal of this dissertation thesis is to design and verify a new concept of process management principles, procedures and tools application, utilizable in the software development project management field. Emphasis is placed on creating a general (i.e. generally usable) concept, derived from solid theoretical background and suitable for further expansion and modifications. The theoretical part of the thesis has two main chapters. In the "Process management" chapter, the individual derived principles (Effectiveness, Added value, Coherence, Portability, Adequate standardization, Measurability, Clarity, Integration, Accountability, Continuous improvement) and procedures (Initiation, Identification, Definition, Validation, Implementation, Revision) are described and interconnected into an integrated concept, usable for the introduction and development of process management in the organization, supported by appropriate ICT tools (mainly from four selected areas -- Modeling and Simulation, Performance measurement, Change management, Administration). In the "Project Management" chapter, the project management area is embedded in the broader context of a process-driven organization in line with modern models of strategic ICT governance and ICT services management. The main dimensions of project management as well as the process approach to project management, which helps to bridge the gap between unique/temporary projects and repeatable/stable processes, are described. Basis for the normative project processes design in the following part of the thesis is set by the evaluation of selected models of the project life cycle and project management methodologies. The practical part of this thesis is basically a verification of the concept, described in the theoretical chapters. Firstly, an original project management methodology, suitable for deriving process model of the subject area, is presented. On this basis -- and by using the previously described principles, procedures and process management tools -- the major artifacts of a reference project processes model are elaborated (such as Conceptual model of the subject area, List of events and natural processes, Process pyramid, Process model, Organization model, Indicators pyramid or RACI matrix of roles and processes/indicators /SLAs; setup of selected process model is also verified experimentally by simulations). Critical evaluation of the presented model is an important input for the final assessment of the thesis goals' achievement and proposal of further research fields.