Alireza Shojaei

Alireza Shojaei
Virginia Tech (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University) | VT · Myers-Lawson School of Construction

About

73
Publications
37,296
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1,097
Citations

Publications

Publications (73)
Preprint
Full-text available
Current autonomous building research primarily focuses on energy efficiency and automation. While traditional artificial intelligence has advanced autonomous building research, it often relies on predefined rules and struggles to adapt to complex, evolving building operations. Moreover, the centralized organizational structures of facilities manage...
Preprint
Full-text available
Automating activities through robots in unstructured environments, such as construction sites, has been a long-standing desire. However, the high degree of unpredictable events in these settings has resulted in far less adoption compared to more structured settings, such as manufacturing, where robots can be hard-coded or trained on narrowly define...
Article
Full-text available
The ongoing improvement of teaching abilities among faculty is recognized as essential across various academic disciplines. Within the Construction Management and Engineering (CME) field, there's a notable need for such professional development. Our study looks into a specific program designed to bolster the teaching capacities of new faculty in fo...
Article
Faculty development programs improve the performance of academic scholars and instructors by providing up-to-date teaching and research management tools and methods. The overall objective of this research was to organize a pilot faculty development program for recent graduates of construction programs in which participants could improve their teach...
Article
Full-text available
The importance of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry has become increasingly salient as the industry continues to struggle with recruitment and retention of high-quality talent throughout construction organizations in the US. The existing literature has explored the barriers faced...
Conference Paper
Digital Twins (DTs) have recently drawn considerable attention in the AEC industry and academia. Despite their applications, most models typically represent an isolated DT without considering how they can connect to other DTs, where they can share data. Blockchain-based solutions, and specifically Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), have provided various f...
Conference Paper
Digital Twin (DT) technology provides a comprehensive virtual representation and dynamic mirror of the physical infrastructure, which is invaluable for Facility Management (FM) applications. However, its operations and sensitive data are managed by the centralized infrastructure, which is relatively vulnerable to being compromised. To address these...
Conference Paper
The architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry is widely known for being fragmented. In this situation, blockchain technology has been introduced as a promising solution to bring trust and transparency to the industry. As blockchain technology continues to evolve, it has embraced new capabilities and features, including Fungible-Tok...
Conference Paper
Material procurement comprises a considerable portion of costs in construction projects. In addition to increasing costs, inefficient material procurement can impact a project’s schedule and duration. Nevertheless, efficient procurement management use has been limited in the construction industry. A more efficient approach to information management...
Article
Full-text available
With the advent of technological tools, systems, and mechanisms, the operating system in the construction industry has changed enormously. While technological advancements cover a broad area of software and hardware, those involved in data flow have significant roles in data sustainability. The data flow presupposes various requirements, interactio...
Chapter
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The built environment fundamentally suffers from organisational fragmentation in various aspects, such as data flow, finance, and supply chains. Blockchain technology can be considered a transformative solution to the inherent fragmentation of this industry. This chapter first defines the basics of blockchain technology to show how a peer-to-peer n...
Article
Full-text available
Construction site visits and hands-on experiences are among the important instruments for educators in construction engineering and management to provide students with valuable knowledge and more engaging learning experiences. However, in addition to its existing logistical challenges, the COVID-19 pandemic has made site visits even more inaccessib...
Article
Full-text available
Construction site visits and hands-on experiences are among the important instruments for educators in construction engineering and management to provide students with valuable knowledge and more engaging learning experiences. However, in addition to its existing logistical challenges, the COVID-19 pandemic has made site visits even more inaccessib...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The ever-growing complexity of construction projects on the one hand, and the increasing use of emerging technologies in the AEC industry on the other hand, have significantly escalated computational complexity. This trend is expected to continue. However, conventional computing tools and technologies highly rely on classical computing techniques t...
Article
Circadian rhythms, as nychthemeron cycles, are a component of the body’s internal clock that regulate essential functions and processes, which are vividly reflected in sleep routines. While issues pertaining to sleeping patterns are general, the problem is underscored among students who may not have established norms due to internal and external mo...
Article
Current incentive mechanisms for construction safety highly rely on intermediaries and massive paperwork, which lay a foundation for opportunistic behavior and poor performance in the long run. As a solution, this study introduces an automatic incentive mechanism that rewards contractors with Fungible Tokens (FTs) and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). Vi...
Article
Full-text available
Background Occupational workers at altitudes are more prone to falls, leading to catastrophic outcomes. Acrophobia, height-related anxiety, and affected executive functions lead to postural instabilities, causing falls. This study investigated the effects of repeated virtual height exposure and training on cognitive processing and height-related an...
Article
Work-related musculoskeletal disorders is a serious problem affecting the construction workforce. Pipe workers are subjected to forward bending tasks that cause back injuries. Recent advancements in wearable robotic technologies have led to a growing interest in the use of back-support exoskeletons as a potential solution to reduce the occurrences...
Article
The potential of using Digital Twins within the context of civil infrastructures has prompted a focus on infrastructure digital twins (IDTs). Despite some attempts to provide an overview of IDT knowledge domains, no specific study has focused on the inner structure and components of IDTs. This paper attempts to address this gap by taking a deeper l...
Article
Safety has been one of the main concerns in the construction industry in recent years. Construction fatalities, injuries, and accidents impose unrecoverable losses and enormous costs every year. Despite all advancements in new methods, tools, equipment, and regulations, the rate of accidents, especially in fatal four, has not considerably improved....
Article
Full-text available
Digital Twins (DTs) have received considerable attention as an emerging technology in recent years, which can offer advantages for improving the performance of infrastructures. However, the inherent complexity of infrastructures alongside the nascent nature of digital twins in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry hinders t...
Article
Purpose Smart contracts using blockchain technology (BCT) is a tool that decentralizes authority and makes it easier to upgrade the contract administration process by providing an efficient system. Current literature provides a good overview of contracts in the construction industry; however, the specific details of BCT's smart contracts applicatio...
Article
Full-text available
Construction management is considered a hands-on field of study which requires good spatial and visual cognitive ability. Virtual reality and other innovative immersive technologies have been used to facilitate experiential learning and to improve students’ spatial cognitive abilities. Virtual environments have been criticized due to the gamified l...
Article
Full-text available
Research indicates that the projection of traffic volumes is a valuable tool for traffic management. However, few studies have examined the application of a universal automated framework for car traffic volume prediction. Within this limited literature, studies using broad data sets and inclusive predictors have been inadequate; such works have not...
Article
Full-text available
Knowledge of the truck traffic volumes on state and interstate highways is critical for highway authorities and federal organizations. Increased urbanization, population growth, and economic development have led to an increased demand for freight travel. Several planning applications demand reliable and accurate truck traffic prediction. A review o...
Article
Full-text available
Several converging trends appear to reshape the way citizens and goods move about. These trends are social, including urbanization and population growth, and technological, such as increased automation and connectivity. All these factors influence the market for connected, automated, shared and electric (CASE) vehicles, which presents many opportun...
Article
The concept of a circular economy (CE) encompasses a comprehensive approach to conscious design and material choice, in addition to keeping products at their utmost utility during production, operation, and reuse cycles through the implementation of closed loops. A blockchain allows for a fast, secure, and accessible information network by providin...
Article
The highway network is an economically necessary form of transportation that has a significant impact on the quality of the life of the citizens who use it. Cost overruns in highway projects have been a universal occurrence that jeopardize the development, maintenance, and expansion of this vital infrastructure. Incorrect cost estimations can drive...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Improving the productivity and quality of construction projects along with the minimization of cost and time are significant concerns in construction engineering and management. These concerns have stimulated specialists to gather the best practices and generate new techniques leading to more productive projects. Constructability review is one of t...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Since the Kyoto Protocol was ratified in 1997, many countries have tried to reduce their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by implementing various reduction schemes. Carbon credit trading, one of these programs, has been used in many countries to comply with the protocol. In spite of the existence of carbon credit markets for over a decade, global GHG...
Conference Paper
Exploring construction education models, defined by the amount of lab or lecture content, and their characteristics, has been a focal point of many studies in recent years. Researchers investigate different aspects of construction curricula and provide guidelines to improve construction education. The range of factors and variables involved makes i...
Article
Full-text available
Earthmoving is one of the main processes involved in heavy construction and mining projects. It requires a significant share of the project budget and can dictate its overall success. Earthmoving related activities have a stochastic nature that affects the project cost and duration. In common practice, the equipment required for a project is select...
Article
In the construction sector, the absence of a framework to incorporate and synchronize the resources required for activities means that projects risk incurring cost and time overruns. In this study, a framework was generated and tested to optimize resource allocation. The framework considers financial constraints through a genetic algorithm process...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Immersive video technologies provide a unique opportunity for transferring and experiencing the real environment at a later time and location. The immersive experience and the real image that this emerging technology presents are well suited for education and training. Previously static 360° panoramas and virtual reality environments were being use...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The widespread and massive effects of climate are now inevitable, and action must be taken by all sectors to mitigate their contributions to its impacts. The building sector accounts for about 40% of global energy consumption and 30% of GHG emissions. This sector must reduce its energy consumption by at least 50% by shifting to hyper-efficient syst...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This paper succinctly reports a study performed to explore planning and scheduling as the two key components of every project. Construction project managers devote a major portion of their daily time to develop, revise, and update their schedules. The same emphasis exists in construction education where the content is provided in one or two major c...
Article
Background Falls due to postural instability are common in construction environments especially from a height. The purpose of the study was to investigate the impact of virtual reality (VR)-generated environments at different virtual heights on postural stability. Methods Nineteen adults were analyzed for postural stability, tested in real (No VR)...
Article
Full-text available
Knowledge of the number of upcoming projects and their impact on the company plays a significant role in strategic planning for project-based companies. The current horizon of planning for companies working on public projects are the latest advertised projects for bidding, which in many cases is reported less than a year in advance. This provides a...
Article
Full-text available
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been extensively used on construction job sites in the last ten years. UAVs applications span from progress monitoring and site monitoring to structural health inspection and construction safety. While different applications of UAVs on job sites have been extensively researched, the risks and hazards of flying U...
Article
New offsite construction practices are emerging in the construction industry to address a broad set of productivity issues that cut across organizational, technological, and strategic domains. Despite all its benefits from sustainable and economic perspectives, offsite construction still faces significant resistance from both the construction indus...
Article
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to show the feasibility of blockchain technology to perform as an infrastructure for improving built asset sustainability by providing all the necessary information for better decision making at all the stages of its life cycle. Design/methodology/approach Blockchain technology can be used as a tool to build a...
Article
Full-text available
Background: Virtual reality (VR) is becoming a widespread tool in rehabilitation, especially for postural stability. However, the impact of using VR in a "moving wall paradigm" (visual perturbation), specifically without and with anticipation of the perturbation, is unknown. Methods: Nineteen healthy subjects performed three trials of static bal...
Conference Paper
In recent years, connected automated vehicles (CAV) have received significant attention and have the potential to revolutionize our existing transportation system. Highway infrastructure construction management has to deal with a variety of uncertainties related to traffic volume and capacity due to the impact of AVs in the future. Such ambiguity m...
Chapter
Full-text available
This paper presents an implementation of smart contracts by integrating BIM and blockchain. After briefly reviewing the literature regarding blockchain technology, smart contracts, and integration of the BIM and blockchain, a blockchain network using Hyperledger fabric is proposed and tested to govern a sample construction project. The proposed fra...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Over the past decade, construction companies have been using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) extensively as a tool for data collection. While UAVs are being used on construction job sites on daily basis, there is no comprehensive quantitative method to measure the risks of flying UAVs over a specific area on a job site. Despite some work in quantif...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Automated vehicles (AV) are undergoing development at a remarkable pace and have the potential to revolutionize the existing transportation system. The ASCE [1] evaluated the United States’ infrastructure as a D+ grade. Moreover, they predicted radical infrastructure investment gaps in the surface transportation sector in the upcoming years. Some n...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Blockchain provides a secure decentralized information management system that can solve many common problems facing the construction industry. The loose structure of the construction industry, the way that public and private projects are tendered, and the supply chain system it uses for material and service delivery provide unique challenges and pr...
Conference Paper
Clearly the need for autonomous robots and automated systems is more critical for space construction than terrestrial construction work. It is the collective performance of these devices rather than their individual performances that should be optimized, which calls for the highest level of precision and coordination among all active agents in the...
Conference Paper
While Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been used on construction job sites for different purposes for over a decade, the risks and hazards of flying UAVs on construction job sites has not been either quantitatively or qualitatively assessed. Quantifying the risks of flying UAVs over general populations is a common practice in the general UAV in...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been used on construction job sites for a variety of purposes for more than a decade. But the risks and hazards of flying UAVs on construction job sites has never been quantitatively or qualitatively evaluated. While the general aviation industry has been using sophisticated analysis techniques to quantitatively...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Knowledge of the number of upcoming projects and their impact on the company plays a significant role in strategic planning for project-based companies. The current horizon of planning for companies working on public projects are the latest advertised projects for bidding, which in many cases is reported less than a year in advance. This provides a...
Article
Full-text available
Providing a practical and comprehensive methodology to facilitate management and coordination of multiple projects in a company's portfolio is a challenging task. Historically, the focus of research has been limited to the selection and prioritization of the set of known projects, current and near future. It is argued that existing portfolio planni...
Article
Full-text available
Offsite construction is facing slow adoption despite the fact it can be a suitable solution for addressing historical problems faced by the construction industry, such as labor shortages, construction safety, time and costs overrun, and waste. The controlled factory environment creates room for innovation similar to the techniques used in the manuf...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) are remote controlled or autonomous vehicles that can safely operate on the surface of water bodies such as oceans, seas, and lakes. USVs, along with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can operate without direct or even indirect human control. Use of UAVs in construction has been discussed extensively in the literature...
Poster
During the past few decades the concept of net zero energy (NZE) has gained significant attention and shaped vigorous energy targets at local, state, and federal level. This study aims to evaluate the availability and potential for utilizing different renewable resources in Florida to comply with the NZE strategy as stated in the definition of this...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
It is certain that more autonomous robots and automated systems would be used in Space Construction (SC) compared to construction work on Earth. The performance of these robots should not be locally optimized but instead, collectively be optimized as a whole, which calls for the highest level of precision and coordination among all active agents on...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
For more than a decade, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been used on construction job sites for a variety of purposes including structural inspection, and 3D mapping of the site and existing structures. Although the advantages that UAVs have brought to construction are discussed extensively in the literature, applications of other types of unm...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) are remotely-operated robotic agents that can safely deploy and maneuver on the surface of bodies of water. Although, there is an established body of literature on large, complex and expensive USVs in structural health monitoring, comparing the solutions provided with the current available UAVs and their scale, cost...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Advances in information technology (IT) have provided a continuous and reliable connection to the Internet for everyone. This factor, coupled with the widespread use of digital devices like laptops, cellphones and tablets, have led to the emergence of “big data”. Nowadays, society is producing and using data at an unprecedented rate. Data centers a...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Offsite construction is facing slow adoption despite the fact it can be a suitable solution for addressing historical problems faced by the construction industry, such as labor shortages, construction safety, time and costs overrun, and waste. The controlled factory environment creates room for innovation similar to the techniques used in the manuf...
Article
Full-text available
Background Construction companies typically work on many projects simultaneously each with its own objectives and resource demands. Consequently, a key managerial function is to allocate financial, equipment, and human resources between these concurrent projects in a way that satisfies the individual project constraints while optimizing the company...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Providing a practical and comprehensive methodology to facilitate management and coordination of multiple projects in a company's portfolio is a challenging task. Historically, the focus of research has been limited to the selection and prioritization of the set of known projects, current and near future. It is argued that existing portfolio planni...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Portfolio management, in particular, the selection and prioritization of projects among a pool of known projects, has been studied extensively by researchers. However, a major gap in the work from a strategic planning perspective is modeling the stream of unknown future projects. This paper presents findings of an ongoing project that explores a so...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Construction companies typically work on multiple projects each with its own objectives and resource demands. Consequently, a key managerial function is to allocate financial, equipment, and human resources between these concurrent projects in a way that satisfies the individual project constraints while optimizing the company's overall objectives....

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