Used and rejected decisions in design teamwork

Decision making in design requires careful consideration, as any inaccuracies or faults can have serious consequences for the producer, the user and/or the competitiveness of the company. Research investigating decision making in design so far has mainly focused on the selection of decisions as part of technical choices and classical optimisation problems. In recent years, further research has been started to discover the characteristics of successful decision making in industry. These later, mostly single case studies shed light on some general influences on decision making but so far have not identified different relevant patterns of decision-making processes in design teams which are influential on the result and the process of decision making, such as the constituents of rejected decisions. The research study reported here was initiated to further analyse the components of decision-making processes in teams, with special emphasis on the question of how decisions develop during the design process. For example, what happens to rejected decisions in the course of the design process? The observed processes should be analysed in detail by assessing all utterances in an interaction protocol which can be used as indicators of underlying cognitive processes in decision making; this research approach is usually called protocol analysis. In this experimental study using protocol analysis, rejected decisions were compared against those that were chosen to be used in designing the final outcome. The findings show how the designers develop the solution space and illustrate the analysis of decisions as a promising approach to analyse both the individual cognitive process and the contribution of the individual to the decision-making process in design teams.     

Building Information Modeling (BIM) application framework: The process of expanding from 3D to computable nD

The utilization of Building Information Modeling (BIM) has been growing significantly and translating into the support of various tasks within the construction industry. In relation to such a growth, many approaches that leverage dimensions of information stored in BIM model are being developed. Through this, it is possible to allow all stakeholders to retrieve and generate information from the same model, enabling them to work cohesively. To identify gaps of existing work and evaluate new studies in this area, a BIM application framework is developed and discussed in this paper. Such a framework gives an overview of BIM applications in the construction industry. A literature review, within this framework, has been conducted and the result reveals a research gap for BIM applications in the project domains of quality, safety and environmental management. A computable multi-dimensional (nD) model is difficult to establish in these areas because with continuously changing conditions, the decision making rules for evaluating whether an individual component is considered good quality, or whether a construction site is safe, also vary as the construction progresses. A process of expanding from 3D to computable nD models, specifically, a possible way to integrate safety, quality and carbon emission variables into BIM during the construction phase of a project is explained in this paper. As examples, the processes of utilizing nD models on real construction sites are described. It is believed to benefit the industry by providing a computable BIM and enabling all project participants to extract any information required for decision making. Finally, the framework is used to identify areas to extend BIM research.     

Risk based inspection planning for structural systems

Risk based inspection (RBI) planning for engineering systems is considered. Due to difficulties in formulating computationally tractable approaches for RBI for systems, most procedures hitherto have focused exclusively on individual components or have considered system effects in a very simplified manner only. Several studies have pointed to the importance of taking systems effect into account in inspection planning. Especially for large engineering systems it is not possible to identify cost optimal solutions if the various types of functional and statistical dependencies in the systems are not explicitly addressed. Based on new developments in RBI for individual components, the present paper presents an integral approach for the consideration of entire systems in inspection planning. The various aspects of dependencies in the systems are presented and discussed, followed by an introduction to the decision problems encountered in inspection and maintenance planning of structural systems. It is then shown how these decision problems can be consistently represented by decision theoretical models. The presentation of a practical procedure for the inspection planning for steel structures subject to fatigue concludes the paper.     

试论城市发展的战略研究及战略规划的形成

在分析目前我国城市发展战略研究实践的基础上 ,指出目前战略研究具有快速、实效、创新、宏观的特点及对象多元化、方法的趋同化、视角全面化的发展趋势 ,进而提出建立制度化的战略规划的可行性及战略规划编制程序的框架设计。最后指出 ,战略研究不等同于战略规划。城市发展战略研究可以视为一种规划的工作方法 ,而战略规划应当是一个过程 ,是一个技术过程、社会过程和政治过程的结合 ,其最终的成果则必定是基于技术和社会、经济现实的政治决策 ,并有制度性的保障     

Stay or Go? Human Behavior and Decision Making in Bushfires and Other Emergencies

The policy of “leave early or stay and defend”, often shortened to the “stay or go” policy, has been the subject of critical review in the Royal Commission that followed the recent disastrous bushfires in Victoria, Australia. The need for people to evacuate or stay and defend their property and protect themselves is a critical life safety decision for many people on days of high bushfire activity. Some limited research has been undertaken into this individual decision making in bushfires. Other fields of emergency management also require people to make similar decisions as to whether to evacuate or stay in a “defend in place” situation. This paper examines research into “stay or go” strategies and decision making performance for high rise buildings, looking for common factors that may inform the bushfire situation and potential reforms for policy. Similarly, research into Hurricane Katrina and the failures to evacuate when mandated provide further insight into factors which can affect or postpone decision making. A number of common improvements related to emergency preparedness, situation awareness and trusted communication systems emerge in all these fields. However, this paper also suggests that this decision making in bushfires is more complex that just two simple options of “stay or go”. A greater understanding of group behavior and socio-cultural factors and their impact on personal decision making is required if more effective emergency management is to occur in the bushfire domain.     

Are There Counter-Landscapes? On Milk Trestles and Invisible Power Lines

The paper takes its starting point from the duality in the Estonian rural landscape shaped by social practices. On the one hand, the changes and management of landscapes follow a political decision. At the same time, the old patterns of semi-legal activity offer a resistant practice. The study is illustrated with the milk trestle, a now-disappeared symbol of recent history in the Soviet countryside. The milk trestles and their role in Estonian country life are studied from a threefold perspective—their functions, meanings and the values behind this symbol. The article is based on ethnographic field work carried out between the years of 2001 and 2002 and traces the phenomenon of how living landscape transforms into deserted landscape; in other words, how story becomes history. The paper shows how the milk trestle landscape functioned as a prolongation of the former landscape behind the ideological layers of the Soviet landscapes.     

Simulation-based deterioration patterns of water pipelines

Water pipelines deteriorate overtime due to several distressing factors. To keep water pipelines in good condition, municipalities need to use reliable and credible deterioration models and inspection plans to better manage their rehabilitation and maintenance. Thus, this paper presents the development of deterioration models and patterns of water pipelines. The deterioration models consider different water pipe sizes and materials as well as different surrounding environmental conditions which affect their deterioration rates. As a prerequisite to the development of such deterioration models, a condition assessment model for water pipelines was first developed. Questionnaires were distributed among experts to determine the weights of the factors affecting water pipeline conditions using the fuzzy analytic network process. Monte-Carlo simulation was used to account for the large uncertainties of the calculated weights in the development of the condition assessment model. The validation of the model, which was performed using historical data, yielded an average validity percentage of 93.59%. The developed models are expected to help municipalities and decision makers to accurately plan for future water pipelines maintenance and rehabilitation activities based on their different deterioration patterns. It takes into consideration both the uncertainties at the initial stage and those accumulated during the calculation process.     

The choice for expensive owneroccupancy in the Netherlands

The demand for expensive owner-occupied dwellings in the Netherlands needs to be better understood, as this sector is expected to account for an increasing share of the existing housing stock in the near future. This expectation is partly based on changes in government policy made in the past and anticipated for the coming years. To gain insight into the development of that demand, it is important to know which types of household are moving into expensive owner-occupied dwellings. A logistic regression analysis was carried out to determine which factors affect a household's decision to move into a dwelling of this type and how these factors have shifted in the period 1976–1989. This paper argues that even though the household career/lifecycle stil has a strong influence on that decision, the housing market situation should also be taken into account. While demographic and socioeconomic developments suggest a potential for expansion in the more expensive owner-occupied market, the housing market situation might hinder that growth. Harry Boumeester is a researcher at the OTB Research Institute for Policy and Technology, Delft University of Technology. His Ph.D. research concerns the analysis of developments in the demand for expensive owner-occupied dwellings in the Netherland during the last 20 years.     

Re-use of small airfields: a planning perspective

The English countryside has, in recent years, been subject to an array of development pressures, many of which have been the focus of both national and local debate. Local planning authorities (LPAs) have been handed the task of negotiating these pressures and navigating a difficult path between the need to permit necessary development and the desire to sustain environmental quality and local amenity. It is within this context that less contentious development sites have been sought which also offer sustainable solutions. Wartime airfields have, in many instances, been seen as suitable sites for redevelopment and it is patterns of land re-use on such sites that provide the focus of this research monograph.Through a national survey of local planning practice on wartime airfields, and a series of local case studies, the research which is reported within this monograph explores both the ways in which re-use has been regulated by the UK planning system and the nature of re-use on different sites. Maintaining the rights of aviation groups is an added pressure upon this process. More specifically, the monograph focuses attention on current uses on these sites, the regulatory role of the planning system and the compatibility of new and established uses.     

Stakeholder management in construction: An empirical study to address research gaps in previous studies

This paper concentrates on identifying gaps in the scope of previous studies on stakeholder management, and starting to address those gaps by conducting an empirical study. To complete these research objectives, literature review, interviews, questionnaire survey, and a case study were used in this study. Four gaps regarding critical success factors, stakeholder management process, methods for stakeholder management and stakeholder relationship management were identified. Based on an empirical study, a framework for effective stakeholder management is proposed, and the application of a Social Network Analysis technique, as a means of determining the influence of stakeholders on decision making, is illustrated and validated by a case study. These findings can serve as initial references towards a more systematic approach for stakeholder management. Since the empirical study was conducted only in Hong Kong and Australia, further studies should be conducted in other regions to validate and compare with the finding in this paper.     

Recreation succession: A simulation model

Recreation resource managers must deal with a myriad of problems brought on by conflicting goals in maximizing use, minimizing ecological deterioration, and satisfying resource use demands. Rational decision making in this setting demands systematic consideration of the impacts of major changes in the recreational environment on all relevant components of the recreation system. The present study was an effort to provide a model for assessing the impact of a large recreational resort development on existing recreation patterns; specifically, the impact on campground camping in the general area. A dynamic simulation model based on the concepts of user satisfaction and recreation succession was developed and tested for internal consistency. Implications for the decision making process in recreation resource management are discussed.The authors would like to acknowledge the contributions of Anne S. Williams, Lee G. Faulkner, and John F. McCullock to the conceptual development of the model and Leonard R. Johnson's efforts in translating these conceptualizations into concrete equations for computer simulation.This research was supported by the National Science Foundation RANN Program, Grants #GI-29908X, GI-29908XI, and GI-39592, The Impacts of Large Recreational Developments Upon Semi-Primitive Environments.     

Gravitational perspectives in garbage dump siting

The purpose of this paper is to present how the gravitational model in conjunction with behavioral patterns could lead to very different collective dynamics of garbage dump locations as well as to demonstrate how existing dump locations are contingent on dwellers’ behaviors. A gravitational model that uses diverse decision making processes based on physics concepts is used to investigate potential dumping sites. The spatial interaction of this model is characterized by attractive and repulsive forces. With these concepts we developed a dynamic simulation model to demonstrate that spatial interaction processes can predict the location of current dump sites. We also show that this model is able to generate situations such as barycentric solutions or central place systems.     

Fuzzy Cellular Automata Model for Signalized Intersections

At signalized intersections, the decision‐making process of each individual driver is a very complex process that involves many factors. In this article, a fuzzy cellular automata (FCA) model, which incorporates traditional cellular automata (CA) and fuzzy logic (FL), is developed to simulate the decision‐making process and estimate the effect of driving behavior on traffic performance. Different from existing models and applications, the proposed FCA model utilizes fuzzy interface systems (FISs) and membership functions to simulate the cognition system of individual drivers. Four FISs are defined for each decision‐making process: car‐following, lane‐changing, amber‐running, and right‐turn filtering. A field observation study is conducted to calibrate membership functions of input factors, model parameters, and to validate the proposed FCA model. Simulation experiments of a two‐lane system show that the proposed FCA model is able to replicate decision‐making processes and estimate the effect on overall traffic performance.     

Construction site safety in Hong Kong

The structural characteristics of the Hong Kong construction industry, most notably its elaborate system of subcontracting and the casual basis on which labour is employed, pose serious problems for safety managers. By international standards, Hong Kong's construction industry performs very badly in the area of safety. Recent work in the UK and Finland highlights the effectiveness of behavioural techniques to improve safety performance on construction sites. Work is currently under way to test these techniques in the Hong Kong construction setting. The structural properties of the Hong Kong construction industry have been taken into consideration and labour commitments to the group and to the organization have been identified for additional consideration in research. It is expected that these variables will intervene in the application of behavioural techniques to determine their effectiveness. This paper investigates the theoretical background to commitment at the group and organizational level and presents a site level research model which is illustrative of the possible effects that group and organization level commitment may be found to have on the use of behavioural techniques.     

城市中心区转型的产业升级与空间优化契合——以上海市静安区愚园路专业街建设为例

以上海市静安区愚园路专业街建设为例,探讨城市中心区转型过程中产业升级与空间优化的互动配合。认为通过分析产业的内外环境,可使产业与空间在发展过程上紧密联系;二者有效契合并相互促进的关键在于准确分析产业升级路径起讫点、切合实际把握空间变化趋势并在规划建设中落实完善。     

土壤异位改良工程在中国大型景观场地开发中的应用——以第十届中国花博会为案例

从土壤工程入手,针对土壤质量制约中国生态景观质量提升且土壤工程系统研究报道较少的现状,以第十届花博会现场实施的土壤异位改良工程为例,分析其设计愿景和现状矛盾,总结出表土收集和再利用、土壤改良配方设计、土壤生产基地建设和运营、地形再建和改良种植土回填四大关键步骤和技术要领;并通过土壤质量主控指标全过程监控,确保58万m3种植土成品的生产质量,为花博会的顺利召开和高品质景观营建提供了技术保障。分析了土壤异位改良工程符合我国的发展需求,阐述其兴起的时机已成熟,并提出将其作为专项实施工程,依托其快速成景的特点,建立适宜我国不同场地应用的技术体系,以及建立长期定位监测研究4条建议,以期为土壤异位改良工程在我国大型景观开发场地中的应用提供借鉴,丰富我国的土壤工程学技术。     

Integrating a Human Behavior Model within an Agent‐Based Approach for Blasting Evacuation

Several studies on Emergency Management are available in the literature, but most of them do not consider how the human behavior during an emergency can affect the evacuation process. Therefore, the novel contribution of this article is the implementation of an agent‐based model to describe the evacuation, due to a blast in a public area, integrated with a human behavior analytical model. Each agent has its own behavior that is described in a layered framework. The first layer simulates the “agent's features” function. Then, an “individual module” describes dynamically the emotional aspects using (i) the Decision Field Theory, (ii) a stationary stochastic model, and (iii) the results coming from a questionnaire. An agent‐based model with integrated human behavior is proposed to test critical infrastructures in emergency conditions without performing full scale evacuation tests. Analyses could be performed both in real time with a hazard scenario and at the design level to predict the system response to identify the optimal configuration. Therefore, the development of the proposed methodology could support both designers and policy makers in the decision‐making process.     

Neighbourhood Restructuring and Residential Relocation: Towards a Balanced Perspective on Relocation Processes and Outcomes

This introductory paper to this special issue of Housing Studies questions whether various characteristics of the debate and research on gentrification, displacement and restructuring justify a largely negative perspective on the processes and outcomes of ‘forced’ residential relocation. We argue that a proper and fuller consideration of issues around policy, context, process and outcomes enable researchers and commentators to avoid ready characterisations and self-fulfilling investigations of restructuring which serve to present it as a singular (and somewhat suspicious or conspiratorial) phenomenon. For this purpose, we present a broad conceptual framework for restructuring and relocation studies, based on these four themes. Subsequently, we review major issues in restructuring and gentrification discourses, and briefly reflect upon some of the factors underlying the negative loading of the term displacement. We also identify caveats in the evidence base of relocation studies, both in the United States and in Europe. Finally, we introduce the papers in this special issue. The overall aim of this issue is to offer a more open, balanced starting position for analysis of urban restructuring processes and relocation outcomes, particularly in relation to areas of social housing.     

Firm relocation patterns incorporating spatial interactions

This paper developed a relocation pattern for analyzing decisions regarding the relocation process of individual firms by using discrete choice models. Within this framework, three decision points in the relocation process are maintained in the micro-simulation modeling. The first decision that is move or non-move is modeled by using a binary logit form with the outcome of the probability of moving. The second decision, choosing the destination region, is modeled as a multinomial logit model with the outcome of the conditional probability of choosing a region. The final decision, choosing the new zone, is estimated by considering the spatial interactions. For example, the correlation among firms in the deterministic term and the spatial correlation among zones in the error term are considered by mixed logit models. The results of the study indicated that large firms and older firms have a lower probability of relocation. Moreover, this research found out that migrating firms are more attracted in regions with high accessibility. Finally, spatial factors and land prices in a given zone strongly affect the zone choice decision-making process of all firms.