Construction site is dynamic as facilities, equipment, materials needs to be arranged to different places on a daily basis. Engineers have to plan the site layout immediately. This research aims to develop a motion planning and coordination method to evaluate the site layouts. The method includes four steps: (1) model development, (2) C-Space (configuration space) construction, (3) path finding, and (4) machine coordination. The method can be used to do motion planning for mobile construction machineries, to generate a collision-free path for avoiding possible conflicts, and to coordinate the motion of multiple construction machineries moving simultaneously in a construction site. Two virtual construction site is constructed to test the efficiency of the developed method. The results indicate the method can provide a collision free path for two machineries in different complexity environment within a minute. This can help engineers evaluate the site layout plan in a logistics approach and determined the possible site layout.

Occupational safety is an important issue in construction. Although technology innovations are benefiting the different areas of construction, safety, still being challenged by fatalities in the industry, has not fully taken advantage of these innovations. Besides, safety audit data collected by contractors internally have mostly been used for meeting discussions only and not been further utilized for active learning. Additionally, the paper-based audit method is not well structured and often leads to repeated efforts and inconsistency among the data records. In this research, we proposed a safety audit system, iSafe, to facilitate the safety audit process on site and to collect high-quality data records for violation pattern analysis. The system went through three stages of design and development with the participation of safety subject experts from the greater Seattle area. An iPad 2 based prototype system was developed for field use and evaluation. A questionnaire survey was administered for the initial assessment of iSafe and the system is currently undergoing a three month field evaluation phase with the participation of three general contractors. The design and development of the system has been previously reported and the paper will limit its discussion to the strategies used during prototype deployment.

Construction has been one of the most dangerous industries, with fall being the most common type of hazards. This research is sponsored by OSHA to develop six 3D visualized and scenario-based training cases on the topic of fall protection. The cases use minimum amount of text descriptions and intend to maximize the benefits of visualization. We hope our 3D simulated training scenarios will reduce the language and literacy barriers for potential trainees, and increase trainees understanding as well as learning interests on the topic of fall protection.

The composite hazard consisting of flood, debris flow, deep collapse, shallow collapse and landslide dams was responsible for the massive scale of the disaster in Siaolin village from the typhoon Marakotin Taiwan. This kind of disasters are usually not well understood by the general public; however they often cause huge damage due to the lack of vigilance regarding such disasters. In this research, we proposed a game-based walkthrough approach to simulate a large scale and composite hazard to promote of disaster prevention. The system uses a storytelling style combined with a walkthrough of the disaster in a virtual environment. The disaster introduction method consists of two steps: the introduction step and the simulation step. The introduction step introduces the process and details of the disaster through voice narration and reading material. Then the simulation step provides the walk through and visualization of the disaster. The proposed method provides a story telling based, interactive environment, which can motivate people to understand the disaster and help them realize the importance of disaster preparedness. Through this system, we are able to understand the whole course of the hazards, raise people’s awareness of the disaster and thereby reduce the damage caused.

Accessibility is one critical issue in site planning. Good accessibility plan avoid the possible conflicts between the equipment and allows smooth transportation during the entire project. It can also ensure the sufficient space for safely working of all onsite equipment, such as trucks, cranes and excavators. In current practice, the evaluation of accessibility is done manually, heavily relying on the experience of the construction planners. However, the evaluation needs to deal with temporal and spatial information simultaneously, which make the manual evaluations very challenging. This research develops a sandbox environment for construction planners. Because tractor-trailers are usually critical in accessibility evaluations, we specifically focus the simulation of the two-section vehicles. Four major steps were involved: Step 1: deriving a generic tractor-trailer mathematic model, which allows real-time simulation of physics in computers. Step 2: digitalizing a 2D site plan to the 3D virtual environment. Step 3: developing evaluation methods for accessibility, considering both safety and operability. Step 4: visualizing the evaluation results. We implemented the four steps using Microsoft XNA (a game platform) and Nvidia PhysX (a game engine). An example case is presented by using the sandbox environment to evaluate the construction site accessibility. We found that the realistic visualizations and simulations provide solid references for construction planners. They are able to identify potential accessibility problems and unsafe situations in the sandbox environment and avoid them early in the design and planning stages.