The World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic on the 11th of March 2020, but the world is still reeling from its aftermath. Originating from China, cases quickly spread across the globe, prompting the implementation of stringent measures by world governments in efforts to isolate cases and limit the transmission rate of the virus. These measures have however shattered the core sustaining pillars of the modern world economies as global trade and cooperation succumbed to nationalist focus and competition for scarce supplies. Against this backdrop, this paper presents a critical review of the catalogue of negative and positive impacts of the pandemic and proffers perspectives on how it can be leveraged to steer towards a better, more resilient low-carbon economy. The paper diagnosed the danger of relying on pandemic-driven benefits to achieving sustainable development goals and emphasizes a need for a decisive, fundamental structural change to the dynamics of how we live. It argues for a rethink of the present global economic growth model, shaped by a linear economy system and sustained by profiteering and energy-gulping manufacturing processes, in favour of a more sustainable model recalibrated on circular economy (CE) framework. Building on evidence in support of CE as a vehicle for balancing the complex equation of accomplishing profit with minimal environmental harms, the paper outlines concrete sector-specific recommendations on CE-related solutions as a catalyst for the global economic growth and development in a resilient post-COVID-19 world.

A critical analysis of the impacts of COVID-19 on the global economy and ecosystems and opportunities for circular economy strategies

https://pure.hw.ac.uk/ws/files/6700255/Tracking_MEP_Works_v2.pdf

The value of integrating Scan-to-BIM and Scan-vs-BIM techniques for construction monitoring using laser scanning and BIM: The case of cylindrical MEP components

Exploring environmental and economic costs and benefits of a circular economy approach to the construction and demolition sector. A literature review

Performance evaluation of ultra wideband technology for construction resource location tracking in harsh environments

Vision-based action recognition of earthmoving equipment using spatio-temporal features and support vector machine classifiers

This article assesses the combined influence of information integration and automated data analytics on project performance. To this end, retrospective data on 78 completed projects, with a total installed value of $8 billion, was collected. The level of internal and external information integration and automated analytics were used as surrogates of real-time project controls for statistical analyses purposes. Indeed, non-parametric statistical techniques were used to assess the impact of such technologies on cost and schedule performance. Overall, teams with a sophisticated degree of information integration and automated data analytics can control their projects with more reliable information and in a proactive manner so that informed decisions can be timely made on behalf of the project and the organization. DOI 10.5592/otmcj.2015.2.3 Research paper

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Impact of Real-time Project Control on Capital Project Cost and Schedule Performance

Even though the fundamental importance of construction components in any given project, industry practices still solely rely on the human ability to individually control thousands of these components on the field. This lack of automation frequently results in critical errors that negatively affect project cost and schedule. Recently, though, the undemonstrated notion that materials tracking processes can highly benefit from the implementation of information technologies has been gaining wide industry acceptance. This paper presents the results of a massive study on a large industrial site that aimed at quantifying the impact associated with automating materials tracking processes on craft labor performance. For this purpose, field records from manual and automated tracking processes were collected during the trial. Then, the influence of the automated tracking process on construction performance was determined by considering the manual approach as the baseline for comparison. The results indicate that information technologies can significantly enhance craft labor productivity.

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Impact of fast automated tracking of construction components on labor productivity

The integration of best industry practices into construction curricula can be used to advance the knowledge base of construction graduates and better prepare them to effectively respond to industry challenges. Arguably, construction programs in North American colleges and universities are rather slow in the adoption of industry best practices. This study assesses the state-of-the-art best construction practices integration into higher education curricula. Through the analysis of data collected by means of an online questionnaire, major findings regarding the level of academic awareness on best industry practices, and the level of integration of best practices into higher education curricula, are reported. This study makes three fundamental contributions to the body of knowledge. First, it provides factual data about the extent of use of industry best practices in various construction programs. Second, it discovers that graduate courses are a better fit for delivering information on best practices ...

State-of-the-Art Best Construction Practices Integration into Higher Education Curricula

The successful delivery of capital facility projects demands the existence of effective channels of communication among project participants. Thus, clear unambiguous communication of information is...

Database Expert Planning System for On-Site Design Strategies

Spatial data collection in urban environments for the extraction of building inventory information is important for many applications such as urban planning, storm water management, hazard mitigation, vulnerability assessment, and loss estimation to name a few. Creating and updating building inventory databases in large and developing urban environments benefits from efficient data acquisition and data processing techniques. This study leveraged and integrated the advantages of groundbased mobile laser scanning and aerial photography through an automated method to extract building inventory information. The integration of terrestrial and aerial data enables the identification of buildings in the dataset and the extraction of both roof polygons and wall footprints. The presented method was evaluated with real datasets collected from a typical residential area. The area of roof polygons extracted by the automated approach differs by less than 5% when compared to manually calculated values. Also the proposed method allows for accurate extraction of walls captured within the point cloud.

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David Grau

Papers

Impact of Real-time Project Control on Capital Project Cost and Schedule Performance

Impact of fast automated tracking of construction components on labor productivity

State-of-the-Art Best Construction Practices Integration into Higher Education Curricula

Database Expert Planning System for On-Site Design Strategies

Automated Extraction of Building Geometry from Mobile Laser Scanning Data Collected in Residential Environments