Joseph H. M. Tah

Oxford Brookes University · Faculty of Technology, Design and Environment

This study investigates the factors contributing to the limited implementation of open BIM (Building Information Modeling) standards, specifically focusing on the Construction Operations Building Information Exchange (COBie) and Industry Foundation Class (IFC), within the field of facilities management. A qualitative research approach was employed,...

Regular inspections during construction work ensure that the completed work aligns with the plans and specifications and that it is within the planned time and budget. This requires frequent physical site observations to independently measure and verify the completion percentage of the construction progress performed over periods of time. The curre...

Regular inspections during construction work verify that the work completed is consistent with the plans and specifications and ensure that it is within the planned time and budget. This requires frequent physical site observations to independently measure and verify the completion percentage of the construction progress performed over periods of t...

International joint ventures (IJVs) are a specific type of strategic alliance between contractors from developed and developing countries and have been increasingly used. IJVs between multinational organisations are considered a successful strategy to benefit from international market opportunities in the globalised world. International constructio...

Post-conflict reconstruction has been one of the most challenging themes for the AEC industry, urban designers and planners, and related decision makers, especially in complex urban contexts with sever destruction of existing infrastructure. The city of Mosul in Iraq is a case where there is an urgent need for reconstruction, in particular the hous...

Post-conflict reconstruction has been one of the most challenging themes for the AEC industry, urban designers and planners, and related decision-makers, especially in complex urban contexts with severe destruction in terms of infrastructure. The city of Mosul in Iraq is a case where there is an urgent need for reconstruction, in particular the hou...

Condition assessment and health monitoring (CAHM) of built assets requires effective and continuous monitoring of any changes to the material and/or geometric properties of the assets in order to detect any early signs of defects or damage and act on time. Most of the traditional CAHM techniques, however, depend on manual labour despite that, in so...

The structural health monitoring (SHM) of buildings is a crucial task which requires continuous monitoring of the physical properties of the asset to obtain actionable and quantitative information about the structure over time. Traditional SHM techniques, however, are tedious and depend on manual labour. Moreover, the inspection of unsafe environme...

The urgent need to improve performance in the construction industry has led to the adoption of many innovative technologies. 3D laser scanners are amongst the leading technologies being used to capture and process assets or construction project data for use in various applications. Due to its nascent nature, many questions are still unanswered abou...

The urgent need to improve performance in the construction industry has led to the adoption of many innovative technologies. 3D laser scanners are amongst the leading technologies being used to capture and process assets or construction project data for use in various applications. Due to its nascent nature, many questions are still unanswered abou...

Climate change and global warming have triggered a global increase in the use of renewable energy for various purposes. In recent years, the photovoltaic (PV)-system has become one of the most popular renewable energy technologies that captures solar energy for different applications. Despite its popularity, its adoption is still facing enormous ch...

In the field of supervised machine learning, the quality of a classifier model is directly correlated with the quality of the data that is used to train the model. The presence of unwanted outliers in the data could significantly reduce the accuracy of a model or, even worse, result in a biased model leading to an inaccurate classification. Identif...

In recent years, companies around the world are trying to expand internationally through collaborative agreements. 'International Construction Joint Ventures' (ICJVs) have become of significant interest as the global construction market continues to be integrated into a more competitive business environment. Moreover, ICJVs can be a mechanism for c...

In Africa, there is an enormous requirement for development of infrastructure in both underdeveloped and developed cities experiencing an exponential growth in population. This strain on existing infrastructure calls for advancement in areas such as energy, construction and engineering. Likewise, continuous rise in global concerns (and specifically...

Clients are increasingly looking for fast and effective means to quickly and frequently survey and communicate the condition of their buildings so that essential repairs and maintenance work can be done in a proactive and timely manner before it becomes too dangerous and expensive. Traditional methods for this type of work commonly comprise of enga...

Clients are increasingly looking for fast and effective means to quickly and frequently survey and communicate the condition of their buildings so that essential repairs and maintenance work can be done in a proactive and timely manner before it becomes too dangerous and expensive. Traditional methods for this type of work commonly comprise of enga...

In construction projects, estimation of the settlement of fine-grained soils is of critical importance, and yet is a challenging task. The coefficient of consolidation for the compression index (Cc) is a key parameter in modeling the settlement of fine-grained soil layers. However, the estimation of this parameter is costly, time-consuming, and req...

In construction projects, estimation of the settlement of fine-grained soils is of critical importance, and yet is a challenging task. The coefficient of consolidation for the compression index (C c) is a key parameter in modeling the settlement of fine-grained soil layers. However, the estimation of this parameter is costly, time-consuming, and re...

The combination of machine learning and numerical methods has recently become popular in the prediction of macroscopic and microscopic hydrodynamics parameters of bubble column reactors. Such numerical combination can develop a smart multiphase bubble column reactor with the ability of low-cost computational time when considering the big data. Howe...

‘International Joint Ventures (IJVs), which are a specific type of strategic alliance between contractors from developed and developing countries, has been increasingly used. IJVs between multinational organisations are considered to be a successful strategy in order to benefit from international market opportunities in the globalised world. Intern...

ABSTRACT: In the most recent years, the Semantic Web applied to Building Information Modelling and Industry Foundation Classes are the most widely recognized efforts in the digitalization of products in the architectural, engineering and construction industry. This study performs knowledge discovery of construction products from domain experts to b...

The adoption of emerging technologies involving open Building Information Modeling (BIM) standards such as Construction Operation Building information exchange (COBie) and Industry Foundation Class (IFC) has been a challenge, especially in the facilities management (FM) domain. The objective of this study is to identify the key factors that influen...

Lessons learned systems are vital means for integrating construction knowledge into the various phases of the construction project life cycle. Many such systems are tailored towards the owner-organisation's specific needs and workflows to overcome challenges with information collection, documentation and retrieval. Previous works have relied on the...

Elements that constitute the built environment are vast and so are the independent systems developed to model its various aspects. Many of these systems have been developed under various assumptions and approaches to execute functions that are distinct, complementary or sometimes similar. Furthermore, these systems are ever increasing in number and...

Non-digital information handover for facilities management could be quite the challenge when evaluating the quality of information in terms of its usefulness and relevance for building operations. Manually searching for errors in large data sets is inefficient, which leads to difficulties in the course of maintenance and operation tasks. Traditiona...

The need to overcome challenges faced by construction industry has been at the core of many government reports. Most of the reports suggest the adoption of innovations including off-site manufacture and emerging Building Information Modelling (BIM) to overcome the challenges facing the industry. Current research has largely focused on the impacts o...

For generations, the process of cost estimation has been manual, time-consuming and error-prone. Emerging Building Information Modelling (BIM) can exploit standard measurement methods to automate cost estimation process and improve inaccuracies. Structuring standard measurement methods in an ontologically and machine readable format for a BIM softw...

The Internet of Things (IoT) represents the rapidly growing number of internet-enabled devices that can communicate with each other and have the ability to transmit and receive data over a network. The IoT is being applied in a diversity of areas to address significant societal challenges. For example, it has been widely acknowledged that cities ar...

The management of risks has been at the heart of most construction projects. Building Information Modelling (BIM) provides opportunities to manage risks in construction projects. However, studies about the use of BIM in risk management are sketchy with a lack of a systematic approach in using BIM for managing risk in construction projects. Based on...

This paper presents a feasibility study of stand-alone solar photovoltaic (PV) systems for the electrification of three residential case study buildings (T4, T5 and T6) in the capital city of Yaoundé, Cameroon. The system was sized taking into account the load of the buildings and the available energy from the sun. The power, area of PV modules and...

Research on digitizing the various aspects of a typical building project has been on the increase since the advent of Building Information Modelling (BIM). Most efforts build on information technology capabilities already achieved in the various professional domains associated with different stages of the building life cycle. It is predicted that B...

The provision of Application Programming Interface (API) in BIM-enable tools can contribute to facilitating BIM-related research. APIs are useful links for running plug-ins and external programmes but they are yet to be fully exploited in expanding the BIM scope. The modelling of n-Dimensional (nD) building performance measures can potentially bene...

Structured Abstract Purpose of this paper Knowledge transfer (KT) practices in five construction projects delivering sustainable office buildings in Germany and the UK are examined using Social Network Analysis (SNA). Design/methodology/approach Case studies were adopted as research strategy, with one construction project representing one case stu...

The emergence of BIM in the construction industry has come with promises of improving efficiency in project delivery and asset management. BIM concerns the digitization of the building project by depending on information technology capabilities already achieved in various professional domains associated with different stages of the building life cy...

BIM has recently gained ground in developed countries. However, the use of BIM in developing countries including Cameroon is not well-known. In this study, BIM implementation in Cameroon is explored. The research methods used are a pilot study, electronic email surveys and in-depth phone interviews. Altogether, 179 professionals having at least a M...

The extraction of materials for the construction of buildings consumes embodied energy and emits CO2 that impacts negatively on the environment. With the recent interest in sustainability, most building regulations, policies, codes and standards require buildings to achieve some stated levels of environmental performance. In Cameroon, a West-Centra...

Building Information Modelling (BIM) is now a global digital technology which is widely believed to have the potential to revolutionise the construction industry. This has been mainly a result of worldwide government initiatives promoting BIM uptake to improve efficiency and quality in delivering construction projects. This push has been accompanie...

BIM has recently gained ground in developed countries. However, the use of BIM in developing countries including Cameroon is not well-known. In this study, BIM implementation in Cameroon is explored. The research methods used are a pilot study, electronic email surveys and in-depth phone interviews. Altogether, 179 professionals having at least a M...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to clarify the CSCW in collaborative 4D modelling and its user interface (UI)/interaction designs for prototyping. Four-dimensional (4D) modelling technology has potentials to integrate geographically dispersed planners to achieve collaborative construction planning. However, applying this technology in teamwo...

In building projects, the extraction of vast quantities of materials is too common. The extraction of materials and the erection of buildings consume embodied energy and emit carbon dioxide (CO2) that impact negatively on the environment. Therefore it is necessary to consider embodied energy and CO2 amongst other factors in selecting building mater...

The built environment sector impacts significantly on communities. At the same time, it is the sector with the highest cost and environmental saving potentials provided effective strategies are implemented. The emerging Semantic Web promises new opportunities for efficient management of information and knowledge about various domains. While other d...

Sustainability is fundamentally transforming construction industries worldwide. The nature of product demanded by tenants, constructed by developers, required by governments and favoured by capital providers is changing and becoming more complex. Seamless transfer of knowledge between the more divergent set of actors involved in these projects is r...

Collaborative working and integrated project delivery (IPD) are considered to be pivotal for the UK Built Environment Sector to rise up to the important challenges, such as reducing carbon emissions and cost, whilst delivering better value to the client. Considerable work remains to be done after nearly 1.5 decades since Egan listed them among the...

The impacts of climate change, the increasing demand for energy and the diminishing fossil fuel resources have resulted in the development and use of a large number of renewable energy technologies in building development. These technologies are generating a huge amount of information which often overwhelms interested users and thus makes it diffic...

The construction industry including its support industries is one of the highest consumers of natural resources. In the act of consumption of natural resources during construction processes, embodied energy and greenhouse gases are emitted which have adverse effects on the natural environment. Thus, recent studies have revealed a significant intere...

Previous studies reveal the need for a tool to evaluate various aspects of building design in early design stages. This paper proposes a multi-attribute based tool to address this need. The tool allows users to evaluate the functionality, economics and performance of buildings concurrently with building design. To illustrate the mechanics of the to...

The major challenges of project risk assessment may be attributed to the knowledge requirements for determining the level of uncertainty and the development of complex models to predict project outcomes. The duration-cost influence network is an adequate model that can be used for activity-based risk modeling. In this study, a scenario analysis fea...

Renewable energy (RE) projects are arguably one of the most important strategies that can be used in the mitigation of climate change impacts. At the same time, RE technologies can generate clean energy and potentially boost the economy of the African continent. It is thus not surprising that recent studies have investigated the relationship betwee...

IntroductionThe Complex Nature of Construction ProjectsConstruction Planning and Virtual PrototypingBuilding Information ModellingInteroperability and Industry Foundation ClassesKnowledge-based Decision Support for Virtual PrototypingThe Promotion of Innovation through Virtual Planning in PracticeConclusion

Globally, the construction sector has to reduce its environmental impact. Institutional innovation is necessary to achieve reductions at the required levels. Robust and rigorous evaluations of the industry's capacity to bring about such innovation are absent, although there is a plethora of policy incentives, and more frequently obligations, for th...

Land is increasingly becoming important as the global economic crisis and climate change impacts continue to grow. This is mirrored in Zambia where the management of land has become very critical, prompting urgent government intervention/regulatory measures in the form of land reform. However, lack of efficient communication mechanisms inhibits the...

The global quest for sustainability in the exploitation of resources and the need for carbon foot-print reduction has resulted in the development of a large number of innovations and a huge amount of knowledge on sustainable building technologies. Unfortunately, users are being overwhelmed with information overload in this area such that it is diff...

Due to the complex and dynamic nature of the construction industry, construction materials management faces many unique challenges from material planning, ordering, receiving and storing, handling and distribution, site usage and monitoring. Poor materials management has been identified as a major source of low construction productivity, cost overr...

Building construction is a very important development activity of any country. In addition to its basic role of providing shelter, the sub-sector contributes significantly to the Gross Domestic Product of both developing and developed countries, and plays an equally important role in the creation of employment. Unfortunately, the way building proje...

IntroductionThe complex nature of constructionAn overview of agent technologyThe state-of-the-art of application of agent technology in constructionDeployment of agent technology in industryChallengesEmerging related technologiesDiscussion and conclusionsReferences

Risk management (RM) comprises of risk identification, risk analysis, response planning, monitoring and action planning tasks that are carried out throughout the life cycle of a project in order to ensure that project objectives are met. Although the methodological aspects of RM are well-defined, the philosophical background is rather vague. In thi...

Data base management technology can improve the quality and reduce the cost of temporary works design. This is achieved by allowing the computer to handle the tedium of translating and transmitting data between programs and allowing the designers to concentrate on the quality of the underlying design. This paper lays the foundation for the use of m...

In urban planning and management, data sharing and integration are always problematic because urban datasets are heterogeneous and scattered in different domains and organisations. This paper introduces the research work being carried within the Virtual Environment Planning (VEPS) project. Based on a loosely-coupled mediator system and Open Geospat...

Construction has a significant effect on human quality of life in the context of sustainable development. The UK government has long recognised this and is taking the lead towards a more sustainable approach to construction processes. Success towards a more sustainable construction can be achieved if the stakeholders are informed of the new technol...

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to develop a quantitative building accessibility assessment model for the construction industry. Design/methodology/approach – The building accessibility assessment criteria are incorporated in a hierarchy structure based on the relevant building regulations and British standards. The analytic hierarchy proc...

There is an increasing need to seamlessly integrate the relevant datasets at both building and urban scales. This paper gives an account of the development of a Data Integration Service (DIS) to implement the integration of Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) building models with urban datasets. It employs the Mediator loose integration method and Op...

The simulation of building efficiency and cost is a crucial driver to contemporary building design today. This paper presents the development of a software tool to simulate the lifecycle costs of building construction and maintenance. It is a part of the nD modelling tool development and also based on the overall system architecture of the nD model...