Vicente A. González

Ricardo Antunes, Vicente A. González, Kenneth Walsh

Projects are finite terminating endeavors with distinctive outcomes, usually, occurring under transient conditions. Nevertheless, most estimation, planning, and scheduling approaches overlook the dynamics of project-based systems in construction. These approaches underestimate the influence of process repetitiveness, the variation of learning curves and the conservation of processes' properties. So far, estimation and modeling approaches have enabled a comprehensive understanding of repetitive processes in projects at steady-state. However, there has been little research to understand and develop an integrated and explicit representation of the dynamics of these processes in either transient, steady or unsteady conditions. This study evaluates the transfer function in its capability of simultaneously identifying and representing the production behavior of repetitive processes in different state conditions. The sample data for this research comes from the construction of an offshore oil well and describes the performance of a particular process by considering the inputs necessary to produce the outputs. The result is a concise mathematical model that satisfactorily reproduces the process' behavior. Identifying suitable modeling methods, which accurately represent the dynamic conditions of production in repetitive processes, may provide more robust means to plan and control construction projects based on a mathematically driven production theory.

Zhenan Feng, Vicente A. González, Ling Ma et al.

Virtual Reality (VR) for Serious Games (SGs) is attracting increasing attention for training applications due to its potential to provide significantly enhanced learning to users. Some examples of the application of VR for SGs are complex training evacuation problems such as indoor earthquake evacuation or fire evacuation. The indoor 3D geometry of existing buildings can largely influence evacuees' behaviour, being instrumental in the design of VR SGs storylines and simulation scenarios. The VR scenarios of existing buildings can be generated from drawings and models. However, these data may not reflect the 'as-is' state of the indoor environment and may not be suitable to reflect dynamic changes of the system (e.g. Earthquakes), resulting in excessive development efforts to design credible and meaningful user experience. This paper explores several workflows for the rapid and effective reconstruction of 3D indoor environments of existing buildings that are suitable for earthquake simulations. These workflows start from Building Information Modelling (BIM), laser scanning and 360-degree panoramas. We evaluated the feasibility and efficiency of different approaches by using an earthquake-based case study developed for VR SGs.