Ali Nejat

Texas Tech University | TTU · Department of Civil, Environmental and Construction Engineering

Given the risk posed by escalating climate conditions, there is a need to assess how localities integrate adaptive planning into hazard mitigation and how this is enabled or constrained by existing planning institutions. We explore this for flood planning in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas, United States – a largely underresourced and highly s...

Purpose Building information modeling (BIM) is a process of creating an intelligent virtual model integrating project data from design to construction and operation. BIM models enhance the process of communicating the progress of construction to stakeholders and facilitate integrated project delivery, coordination and clash detection. However, barr...

Effective knowledge transfer between researchers and practitioners within the hazards and disaster domain has long been a challenging task. The diversity of hazard researchers and practitioners, as well as the high stakes of applying research outcomes, have contributed to the issue. This research aims to explore potential discrepancies between rese...

Household recovery and relocation after a disaster is an exigent and complex decision. This complexity is mainly due to the variety of factors that can influence such a decision. Therefore, it is the goal of this study to develop random parameter models incorporating the unobserved heterogeneity that can result in predicting these recovery decision...

The housing sector is an important part of every community. It directly affects people, constitutes a major share of the building market, and shapes the community. Meanwhile, the increase of developments in hazard-prone areas along with the intensification of extreme events has amplified the potential for disaster-induced losses. Consequently, hous...

Identifying initiatives that influence the decision-making process of individuals in the aftermath of extreme natural events is a critical task in post-disaster recovery research. Due to the diversity of disaster-induced physical and psychosocial damage, as well as the complexity of human behavior, a comprehensive understanding of contributing fact...

Housing recovery plays a key role in the overall restoration of a community. A multitude of factors affect housing recovery, many of which are associated with interactions of residents with their perceived neighborhoods. Targeting perceived neighborhoods rather than administratively defined measures of land helps with devising recovery plans that c...

Post-disaster relocation may occur in the aftermath of major disasters, either unplanned or through buyout programs. There is an extensive research on recovery of affected population. However, research on the factors which cause the households to decide in favor of relocation or reconstruction is still in its infancy. This paper suggests a framewor...

Place attachment has gained considerable attention in disaster studies, though there is little consensus on how to conceptualize or measure this construct in post-disaster environments. Many of the place attachment scales used in disaster studies come from studies of recreational or high-amenity areas, and we do not know whether or to what extent t...

The increasing impacts of disasters, caused by more frequent extreme events coupled with the growth of adverse anthropogenic activities, has raised the importance of fostering more resilient communities. Measuring resilience is a vital step in the process of building and strengthening a community’s resilience as it helps with identifying the priori...

Among the multiple causes of project success in construction of big projects (such as highway projects), punctually delivering of preconstruction activities is increasingly recognized as a quite frequent cause that has not received adequate amount of attention. In this research, after providing an introduction about the different phases and activit...

Although postdisaster housing recovery is an important player in community recovery, its modeling is still in its infancy. This research aims to provide a spatial regression model for predicting households’ recovery decisions based on publicly available data. For this purpose, a hierarchical Bayesian geostatistical model with random spatial effects...

Prior empirical research has demonstrated that the decisions of affected populations can significantly influence housing recovery outcomes following a natural hazard event. The current study seeks to develop an integrated post-earthquake recovery model that explicitly accounts for household decision-making. An empirical probabilistic utility-based...

Reestablishment of housing is a crucial component of the recovery process and has a domino effect on the overall timing of recovery. Anchors of social networks, such as schools and churches, on the other hand, are perceived to be influential in housing recovery decisions. This study provides a model for indexing households’ anchors of social networ...

Place attachment is the social, emotional, and functional bond people experience with a specific geographic area. The formation of this bond is based on several different characteristics of the place, such as property values, local relationships, and employment opportunities as well as the internal attributes of a person, such as age, gender, and i...

Many factors influence decisions made by households impacted by major disasters, including decisions related to rebuilding their homes in situ or relocating to a new home. Our understanding of how recovery priorities play into these decisions, however, is limited, as is our understanding of how these processes vary according to demographic characte...

Literature in the domain of disasters has highlighted the importance of reestablishment of housing to restore a community due to its ripple effect on the overall timing of recovery. In fact, previous research studies have revealed the significance of members of social support networks, such as neighbors, church members, and others who share local c...

To what extent will increasing High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lane-kilometer incentivize carpooling and reduce emissions of air pollutants and greenhouse gases? To answer these questions, we develop a multiple regression model relating HOV lanes and other socioeconomic factors to carpooling propensity in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbi...

This project's purpose was to help local governments enhance the quality and accuracy of their transportation project proposals, thus facilitating the metropolitan planning organization (MPO) project review process. Improving the accuracy and efficiency of project proposals will help to ensure a streamlined approval process, and ultimately provide...

This paper presents the relationships between various winter weather conditions and the total expenditure on purchasing and applying snow and ice control materials and operation costs (labor and equipment) using historical data in Texas, U.S.Work includes developing a statistical model to estimate the normalized total expenditures on snow and ice c...

The success of long-range transportation planning is dependent on the accuracy of projects’ scope of work, cost estimates, and schedules. Obtaining this accuracy can be very difficult, since only limited information is available during the initial project-planning stages. The development of preliminary project scope, cost, and schedule involves num...

When considering the factors important for disaster recovery, one must consider the attachment individuals have toward their living area. This article reviews and synthesizes the current literature on the determinants of place attachment in the context of postdisaster recovery. Although the majority of the reviewed articles focused on disaster reco...

Introduction: This study examines how changes in emotional closeness and exchanges of support among family members after Hurricane Sandy affected residents' psychological outcomes both positively and negatively. Methods: The working sample included 130 family ties reported by 85 respondents recruited from community and shelter residents on Staten I...

Extended Abstract Policies to reduce GHG emissions from road transportation encompass a wide range of strategies (1–3). Common examples of the policies include high efficiency vehicles (4), travel demand management (flexible hours, teleworking) (3), shifting from personal car to public transport (3, 5), alternative fuels (hydrogen, electricity, bio...

Combination of well-chosen indicators into a composite Hurricane Resiliency Index is proposed to assess and monitor hurricane resiliency level of coastal communities across geographical boundaries and the changing process over time. The index is constructed nonparametrically by assigning fixed standardization factors as weights to each of the indic...

People may receive tornado warnings from multiple information sources, but little is known about factors that affect the number of warning information sources (WISs). This study examined predictors for the number of WISs with a telephone survey on randomly sampled residents in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and Joplin, Missouri, approximately 1 year after bo...

Understanding the recovery phase of the disaster cycle is still in its infancy. A thorough grasp of recovery can lead to effective postdisaster planning, which is essential for enabling communities to recover quickly from natural and human-made catastrophes. Recent major disasters such as Hurricanes Sandy and Katrina have revealed the inability of...

Understanding of the recovery phase of a disaster cycle is still in its infancy. Recent major disasters such as Hurricane Sandy have revealed the inability of existing policies and planning to promptly restore infrastructure, residential properties, and commercial activities in affected communities. In this setting, a thorough grasp of housing reco...

Automating the development of construction schedules has been an interesting topic for researchers around the world for almost three decades. Researchers have approached solving scheduling problems with different tools and techniques. Whenever a new artificial intelligence or optimization tool has been introduced, researchers in the construction fi...

Carbon dioxide emissions from human activities are the primary cause of recent climate change. In the United States, the road transportation sector is one of the largest sources of these emissions. Any policies to reduce emissions must therefore include mitigation strategies for on-road transportation. The aim of this paper is to propose a multi-cr...

We analyze a detailed set of driving traces for 536 GPS-equipped taxi vehicles and combine them with the features of four different plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) brands that currently dominate the North American market in order to develop a test data set for PHEV-related research in the field of smart grid. Our developed data set is made a...

In the context of postdisaster recovery, housing reestablishment has been known to be a critical factor as it has ripple effects on the overall timing of recovery. This reestablishment is based on the dynamic behavior of homeowners in the aftermath of disasters. Therefore, to have an effective disaster planning it is essential that policy makers re...

While electrification of the transportation system will help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and our dependency on imported oil, the growing number of Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEVs) can also impose a significant new load on electric grids. In this paper, we develop an agent-based behavioral transportation model of PHEVs for the purpose of...

Natural disasters result in loss of lives, damage to existing facilities, and interruption of businesses. The losses are not instantaneous, but rather continue to occur until the community is restored to a functional socio-economic entity. Hence, it is essential that policy makers recognize this dynamic aspect of the incurred losses and make realis...

The construction industry is experiencing price volatility that equally affects contractors and transportation agencies. While part of this phenomenon can be attributed to instability in cost of fuel and other construction materials, large differences in unit bid items for different projects and among different regions indicate that the problem is...