FYPs/Thesis/Journal from Higher Education Institutions in Hong Kong

Keyword

Below Information is provided by the Higher Insitutions signed MoU with CIC.

Institution

Type

Date: From

To

Institution Title Type Date Author(s) Abstract Link
HKUST Multi-zone indoor CFD under limited information: An approach coupling solar analysis and BIM for improved accuracy Journal 10/2020 Kwok, H.H.L., Cheng, J.C.P., Li, A.T.Y., Tong, J.C.K., and Lau, A.K.H. It is important to monitor the indoor air quality and thermal comfort of an office environment for the wellbeing of its occupants, and, to do so, computational fluid dynamics simulation is more cost-effective than measuring an entire floor. Computational fluid dynamics simulation has been used by previous studies for single rooms and partitioned spaces, but not for office floors with multi-zone ventilation systems, and air infiltrations between different zones through closed doors have been neglected. Also, since it is often not possible to take measurements across an entire floor due to concerns of tenant privacy, few studies have used the limited obtainable field measurements to validate multi-zone computational fluid dynamics simulations. This study describes a methodology to conduct indoor multi-zone steady-state computational fluid dynamics simulation, with improved accuracy, on a typical office floor where there is limited information on carbon dioxide concentrations and temperatures. Heat and mass conservation equations were used to compensate for the lack of information. The mechanical ventilation and air conditioning layout was considered along with the sources of heat and carbon dioxide emissions. To improve the accuracy of the simulation on temperature, a solar analysis, based on building geometry, orientation, materials, location, and weather, was conducted to estimate any solar heat gain and distribution through curtain walls. Building information modeling supported the solar analysis and provided geometric information for the computational fluid dynamics simulation. The methodology was validated by a real case of a commercial building, where the accuracy of the temperature simulation improved by 9.9%. Link
HKUST Modeling of the indoor/outdoor exchange of air pollutants for the selected building with the aid of building information modeling technology FYP 06/2018 CHAN, Chun Tat
LUI, Kin Leung
TANG, Chloe
As with many other metropolitan cities, air pollution is an acute problem in Hong Kong; by affecting the health of its citizens, it affects the health care system and thus imposes economic burden. In 2015, air pollution led to 2,100 premature deaths and a resultant economic loss of HKD 27 billion. While people’s exposure to air pollutants differs in location and their respective activities, the critical occasions when they are exposed to the greatest amount of air pollutants remain ambiguous. Authorities have been attempting to tackle this problem by scrutinising big data to provide real-time estimations of individuals’ exposure to key air pollutants. A crucial element that enables such technology is the capability of obtaining the pollutant concentrations of different indoor-microenvironments based on the outdoor air quality. This paper reports an ongoing study on the simulation of the indoor/outdoor exchange of air pollutants with the aid of Building Information Modelling technology (BIM), followed by computational fluid dynamics simulations. The Exchange Tower in Kowloon Bay was selected as representative of a typical Hong Kong office building; its daily operation and building systems were analysed and evaluated. The results revealed that indoor environments can be described by their temperature and flow fields, which are highly related. The interdependency of these two variables means that the flow field can be derived once sufficient information on the temperature field can be gathered. This is crucial as the dispersion of air pollutants greatly depends on the characteristic of the flow field. In terms of buildings’ operation and management, a properly designed, well-mixed air distribution system was found to be effective in reducing local concentration of inert air pollutants. It was also energy efficient whilst providing comfort to the building occupants. This implies that regulations on improving building systems and monitoring the resulting indoor air quality could reduce people’s exposure to air pollutants and thereby alleviate the associated impacts and their corollaries. N.A.
HKUST Minimization of Construction Waste through BIM-based Clash Detection and Quantification Report 06/2016 Baoshan KUANG
Pik Kei LAM
Nowadays the construction industry is under pressure to explore effective and efficient techniques and tools to decrease its escalating waste generation. However, the current approaches, techniques and tools focus on separate projects on site and limited effort is invested to put attention on pre-construction waste generation related to design stages. Waste that is induced by improper design accounts for a major proportion of the total construction waste. Therefore, this report aims to develop a BIM-based approach in the aspect of waste minimization.

With the clash detection tool in Navisworks, this report demonstrates the clash classification, resolution and the corresponding waste generation of 3 pairs of general component models of a villa, which are architectural model vs. structural model, structural model vs. mechanical model and mechanical vs. plumbing model. Then, compare the result obtained with BIM and that estimated with the current waste factor approach and find out whether the BIM-based waste minimization can be better realized. Consequently, coordinating the models of each building components with clash detection enables efficient management of construction waste.
N.A.
HKUST Mapping of BIM and GIS for Interoperable Geospatial Data Management and Analysis for the Built Environment Thesis 08/2015 Yichuan DENG The Building Information Modeling (BIM) domain and the Geographic Information System (GIS) domain share a mutual need for information from each other. Information from GIS can facilitate BIM applications such as site selection and onsite material layout, while models from BIM help generate detailed models in GIS and achieve better utility management. The mapping between the key schemas in the BIM domain and the GIS domain is the most critical step towards interoperability between the two domains. In this research, Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) and City Geography Markup Language (CityGML) were chosen as the key schemas due to their wide applications in the BIM domain and the GIS domain, respectively. A review of previous studies on the integration between BIM and GIS reveals that so far there is no bi-directional mapping considering both geometric and semantic information between IFC and CityGML. Moreover, the transformation between different Levels of Detail (LoDs) in 3D GIS models has not been fully studied. The objective of this research is to develop techniques and tools to allow bi-directional mapping between key schemas in the BIM domain and the GIS domain considering transformation of geometry, semantic information and LoDs. Three use cases based on the integration between BIM and GIS are presented to show how the integration can facilitate problem solving in the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry.

First, the sufficiency of the IFC schema for storing GIS data was evaluated using text analysis techniques and version different analysis. An extension for IFC 4 was developed to store data from CityGML. Then a linguistic-based semi-automatic mapping framework for IFC and CityGML was developed and evaluated, which showed promising results. The bi-directional mapping between IFC and CityGML was developed using instance-based mapping with reference ontology. The mapping framework was compared to previous studies to show its effectiveness.

Second, the transformation between LoDs in 3D GIS models was developed based on the LoD definitions in CityGML. This is a critical step for mapping between BIM and GIS as 3D GIS models are usually represented in different LoDs. An exterior shell extraction algorithm was proposed to facilitate the transformation between LoDs in CityGML. The algorithms of transformation from higher LoDs to lower LoDs were developed and validated using complex and large-scale 3D GIS models.

Finally, three use cases were developed to show how BIM and GIS can facilitate problem solving in the AEC industry. The first use case aimed to build 3D noise maps for urban environments using data from BIM and GIS. The Italian C.N.R. model was used for noise prediction. The highlight of this use case study is that by using BIM and GIS integration, the noise mapping can be performed at room level and the design models can be flexibly updated. The second use case considered construction supply chain management (CSCM) using BIM and GIS integration. The allocation of consolidation centers for multiple construction sites, which is a problem seldom studied by previous literature, is formulated and solved by integrating BIM and GIS. The third case aimed to develop a 3D underground utility management system for urban environments. The system uses modeling functions in BIM as data sources for utility management. Moreover, an algorithm was developed to allow transforming 2D CAD drawings into 3D utility lines.
N.A.
HKUST Mapping of 3D GIS Digital Building Models in CityGML Across Levels of Details (LoD) Report 06/2013 DU Qianru GIS, a traditional technology used in many fields in the past hundreds years, now develops to a new height. With the fast development of 3D GIS technology, many new data formats established based on this kind of technology. Being a new format, CityGML is mainly used to represent the city models. It is really convenient due to the fact that different levels of detail exist in this kind of model format. Different LoDs have different attributes and used in diverse situations. Now, the models are often built in different LoDs. Therefore, to achieve one model which is in different LoDs, a translator needs to be published. However, until now neither OGC standard nor previous researchers provide an efficient translator for the transformation between different LoDs. Furthermore, the detailed definition for different LoDs was not provided either.

Based on these motivations, this project decided to focus on these two goals. The first part of this project focuses on the differences among different LoDs. Based on the differences, a translator is published and its methodology is also shown in the later part of this report. By using the translator established according to the method in this report, a 3D model sample is provided at the end of the report. This project not only provides a tool to realize the translation between different LoDs, but also offers a convenient method for further research.
N.A.
HKUST Mapping BIM schema and 3D GIS schema semi-automatically utilizing linguistic and text mining techniques Journal 01/2015 Cheng, J.C.P., Deng, Y.C., and Anumba, C. The interoperability between BIM (Building Information Modeling) and 3D GIS (Geographic Information System) can enhance the functionality of both domains. BIM can serve as an information source for 3D GIS, while 3D GIS could provide neighboring information for BIM to perform view analysis, sustainable design and simulations. Data mapping is critical for seamless information sharing between BIM and GIS models. However, given the complexity of todayÕs BIM schemas and GIS schemas, the manual mapping between them is always time consuming and error prone. This paper presents a semi-automatic framework that we have developed to facilitate schema mapping between BIM schemas and GIS schemas using linguistic and text-mining techniques. Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) in the BIM domain and City Geography Markup Language (CityGML) in the GIS domain were used in this paper. Entity names and definitions from both schemas were used as the knowledge corpus, and text-mining techniques such as Cosine Similarity, Market Basket Model, Jaccard Coefficient, term frequency and inverse document frequency were applied to generate mapping candidates. Instance-based manual mapping between IFC and CityGML were used to evaluate the results from the linguistic-based mapping. The results show that our proposed name-to-definition comparison could achieve a high precision and recall. Results using different similarity measures were also compared and discussed. The framework proposed in this paper could serve as a semi-automatic way for schema mapping of other schemas and domains. Link