Robert Amor

University of Auckland · Department of Computer Science

Compliance checking is an essential part of a construction project. The recent rapid uptake of building information models (BIM) in the construction industry has created more opportunities for automated compliance checking (ACC). BIM enables sharing of digital building design data that can be used for compliance checking with legal requirements, wh...

Interpreting and computerising building regulations is crucial for automated compliance checking of buildings, enabling a faster and more objective building permit review. Since natural language regulations are often not designed to be represented formally, integrating formal representations into the regulation drafting process could significantly...

Current research for node classification focuses on dealing with either graph noise or label noise, but few studies consider both of them. In this paper, we propose a new robust node classification method to simultaneously deal with graph noise and label noise. To do this, we design a graph contrastive loss to conduct local graph learning and emplo...

Judgment summaries are beneficial for legal practitioners to comprehend and retrieve case law efficiently. Unlike summaries in general domains, e.g., news, judgment summaries often require a clear structure. Such a structure helps readers grasp the information contained in the summary and reduces information loss. To the best of our knowledge, none...

Recent developments show that large transformer-based language models have the capability to generate coherent text and source code in response to user prompts. This capability can be used in the construction domain to interpret building regulations and convert them into a semantic representation usable for automated compliance checking. While base...

Computerising building regulations to allow reasoning is one of the main challenges in automated compliance checking in the built environment. While there has been a long history of translating regulations manually, in recent years, natural language processing (NLP) has been used to support or automate this task. While rule- and ontology-based info...

This paper reviews three digitalisation projects in the Building Innovation Partnership, an industry-led research and innovation initiative based at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, focussed on improving the transfer of infrastructure information within and between organisations. The BIM to BAM project focuses on the use of client-facing...

Various attempts and approaches have been made to teach individuals about the knowledge of best practice for earthquake emergencies. Among them, Immersive Virtual Reality Serious Games (IVR SGs) have been suggested as an effective tool for emergency training. The notion of IVR SGs is consistent with the concept of problem-based gaming (PBG), where...

Land redevelopment is not a trivial process and involves manually and painstakingly working with planning rules to develop various compliant options. The process is costly, inefficient, and lends itself to automation as long as we have the right computable data. Existing tools have either hard-coded rules that are not responsive to changes in the o...

As Building Information Modeling (BIM) workflows are becoming very relevant for the different stages of the project’s lifecycle, more data is produced and managed across it. The information and data accumulated in BIM-based projects present an opportunity for analysis and extraction of project knowledge from the inception to the operation phase. In...

Building codes enforce a minimum quality level for buildings to ensure the safety of building occupants. Automated code compliance checking (ACCC) can guarantee the consistent application of all relevant building codes to a building model. Recent developments in natural language processing (NLP) constitute a promising solution for automated buildin...

With the recent advances in Information and Communication Technologies in the construction industry, information is exchanged digitally with little regard to the contracts that govern them. Although parties collaborating in project design are contracted to the client, they transact with each other when using BIM and other collaborative practices wi...

Immersive Virtual Reality Serious Games (IVR SG) are being used more frequently as training tools to enhance the preparedness and response of different community groups in the event of disasters such as earthquakes. In this paper, we aim to understand the pedagogical and behavioural considerations for Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) children in the...

Agile teams are not meant to have project managers. Instead, agile methods such as Scrum and XP define roles such as product owner, scrum master, and coach. Studies have uncovered the existence of the project manager in agile projects, pointing to disconnect between theory and practice. To address this gap, a Grounded Theory study with a mixed meth...

Large software conglomerates like Trimble and Autodesk provide consumers with suites of software that perform many functions within the design and construction process. Communicating with software outside of the suite can be highly problematic as file types and communication protocols are proprietary and closed within that software family - the ant...

Scrum innovated the role of the scrum master in software engineering. The scrum master is envisioned in agile literature as the “servant leader” who serves the team in a multitude of different ways, which include promoting scrum, facilitating the team’s functioning, and removing obstacles. However, empirical studies focusing on the role of the scru...

This pre-print is an early version of the paper which deals with the role of the scrum master in agile projects. The paper presents results of the grounded theory study which used both qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate and analyze the scrum masters role. The peer-reviewed version has been accepted for publication by Empirical Soft...

Agile teams are not meant to have project managers. Instead, agile methods such as Scrum and 2 XP define roles such as product owner, scrum master, and coach. Studies have uncovered the 3 existence of the project manager in agile projects, pointing to disconnect between theory and 4 practice. To address this gap, a Grounded Theory study with a mixe...

The quest to automate compliance checking processes needed for planning, design, construction and operations has been an active research topic for half a century. Literature has provided evidence of extensive research effort, with varying degrees of success, alongside the evolution of computing and supporting technologies. New innovations in theore...

Children are vulnerable in earthquakes, but they are also essential to foster earthquake‐resilient communities. It is critical to enhance the preparedness of children against earthquakes through effective education and training. Immersive virtual reality (IVR) and serious games (SGs) are innovative digital technologies that enable realistic and eng...

Information exchange in a building information modelling (BIM) environment is critical yet complex due to the multi-party collaboration nature of a construction project. Uncoordinated workflows with a limited structure for approvals leave the exchange transactions prone to contractual, legal, and security challenges. In contrast to most studies tha...

Earthquake emergencies require a variety of behavioral responses in order to ensure the safety of occupants, which is different from simply exiting a building in fire emergencies. This makes it more complex to train building occupants in order to acquire skills that align to best practices for immediate earthquake response and post-earthquake evacu...

Following decades of research, the potential of automated rule-checking applications for building models to boost the productivity in the AECO industry has yet to fully materialize. Most efforts have been dedicated to dealing with the complexities associated with formalizing rules related to building designs for computability. To make automated rul...

We present a methodology and prototype software framework to formalise normative provisions related to building design and construction to support automated compliance audit processes of ISO-standard building information models (BIM). Our framework is based on the declarative Answer Set Programming (ASP) logic programming language that we extend to...

Enhancing the earthquake behavioral responses and post-earthquake evacuation preparedness of building occupants is beneficial to increasing their chances of survival and reducing casualties after the mainshock of an earthquake. Traditionally, training approaches such as seminars, posters, videos or drills are applied to enhance preparedness. Howeve...

The IFC data model has several hundred entities and thousands of attributes, relationships, quantity and property sets that can represent various aspects of a construction project. A one-to-one mapping between a BIM software tool's native data format and the IFC data exchange standard is not possible. This complexity makes it difficult for the tran...

One key ingredient in the automated compliance audit process is the availability of a computable form of normative requirements (e.g. codes and standards), which are usually written in natural language intended for human interpretation and not readily processable by machines. The predominantly ‘Blackbox’ approach of hardcoding these computable norm...

This poster describes the current research direction of the topic: How can interoperability of BIM Data exchange be measured accurately?

Modern regulatory frameworks, such as those enforceable in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, allow car-park ventilation systems to be designed to comply with performance-based objectives. This has provided designers with the opportunity to propose an alternative solution when prescriptive requirements are either too restrictive or costly to imple...

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) has been increasingly used for bridge inspection in the past few years and the recent development of 3D bridge models generated by UAV photogrammetry is highly promising for inspection purposes. However, the current practices of UAV-enabled bridge inspection require human control, during which process the UAV is flying...

Current conformance tests for BIM (Building Information Modelling) data exchange standards are not reliable, as reported in the literature. It is understood that no conformance test can check for 100% error-free operation, as it is a test of the ability to exchange information rather than a measure of the quality of the information exchange. This r...

Current conformance tests for BIM (Building Information Modelling) data exchange standards are not reliable, as reported in the literature. It is understood that no conformance test can check for 100% error-free operation, as it is a test of the ability to exchange information rather than a measure of the quality of the information exchange. This r...

In the aftermath of major earthquakes, rapidly capturing and quantifying the extent and severity of damage on critical bridges play an important role in post-earthquake operations such as search and rescue, emergency repairs and long-term reconstruction. Current damage assessment practices, however, are labour intensive, time consuming and subject...

There is a growing body of research looking to understand the best approaches to visualize data within a 3D context. A particularly difficult form of visualization is where there are multiple streams of time-series data present in that context. This is found with Building Management Systems (BMS) which provide a sensor rich view of the functioning...

Enhancing the earthquake behavioral responses and post-earthquake evacuation preparedness of building occupants is beneficial to increasing their chances of survival and reducing casualties after the main shock of an earthquake. Traditionally, training approaches such as seminars, posters, videos or drills are applied to enhance preparedness. Howev...

This study reports the results of the systematic literature review conducted to gather all the interoperability measurement models in various domains ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 27-June-2019 ---...

Legal expert systems are computer applications that can mimic the consultation process of a legal expert to provide advice specific to a given scenario. The core of these systems is the experts’ knowledge captured in a sophisticated and often complex logic or rule base. Such complex systems rely on both knowledge engineers or system programmers and...

It is well recognized that traceability links between software artifacts provide crucial support in comprehension, efficient development, and effective management of a software system. However, automated traceability systems to date have been faced with two major open research challenges: how to extract traceability links with both high precision a...

The proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Construction Applications of Virtual Reality (CONVR2018), 22 to 23 Nov 2018 at Auckland, New Zealand, pp. 583. The proceedings contain 62 papers in 6 streams: AR-VR, Sensing & AI, BIM & GIS, Collaboration and Design Support Systems, Knowledge and Theory Frameworks, and Serious Games and Wearab...

The progressive uptake of ISO-standard BIM (Building Information Modelling) in the Architecture, Engineering, Construction, and Facilities Management (AEC/FM) industry in recent years has started to make common building information accessible to all project stakeholders and processes. Building Consent Authorities (BCA) are exploring how to take adv...

The progressive uptake of ISO-standard BIM (Building Information Modelling) in the Architecture, Engineering, Construction, and Facilities Management (AEC/FM) industry in recent years has started to make common building information accessible to all project stakeholders and processes. Building Consent Authorities (BCA) are exploring how to take adv...

An appropriate and safe behavior for exiting a facility is key to reducing injuries and increasing survival when facing an emergency evacuation in a building. Knowledge on the best evacuation practice is commonly delivered by traditional training approaches such as videos, posters, or evacuation drills, but they may become ineffective in terms of k...

En­hanc­ing evac­uee safety is a key fac­tor in re­duc­ing the num­ber of in­juries and deaths that re­sult from earth­quakes. One way this can be achieved is by train­ing oc­cu­pants. Vir­tual Re­al­ity (VR) and Se­ri­ous Games (SGs), rep­re­sent novel tech­niques that may over­come the lim­i­ta­tions of tra­di­tional train­ing ap­proaches. VR and...

One objective of the performance-based design (PBD) of fire safety in buildings is to ensure occupants have an adequate time to escape the effects of the fire unharmed. A commonly accepted threshold of the safe evacuation time is the time it takes for the fire to compromise the escape routes rendering them untenable. This is a complex computational...

Since the early nineties, there have been major studies carried out to learn the behaviour and performance of composite structures exposed to fire. It is essential that structural members maintain their integrity and load bearing capacity under elevated temperature for an adequate duration to allow building occupants to escape and for any firefight...

An appropriate and safe behavior for exiting a facility is key to reducing injuries and increasing survival when facing an emergency evacuation in a building. Knowledge on the best evacuation practice is commonly delivered by traditional training approaches such as videos, posters, or evacuation drills, but they may become ineffective in terms of k...

Enhancing evacuee safety is a key factor in reducing the number of injuries and deaths that result from earthquakes. One way this can be achieved is by training occupants. Virtual Reality (VR) and Serious Games (SGs), represent novel techniques that may overcome the limitations of traditional training approaches. VR and SGs have been examined in th...

Enhancing evacuee safety is a key factor in reducing the number of injuries and deaths that result from earthquakes. One way this can be achieved is by training occupants. Virtual Reality (VR) and Serious Games (SGs), represent novel techniques that may overcome the limitations of traditional training approaches. VR and SGs have been examined in th...

A rapid uptake of Building Information Modelling (BIM) by architects in recent years has enabled improved collaboration and better information sharing among project stakeholders. BIM will continue to have a positive impact on the quality improvement of the built environments and the overall productivity boost in the industry. One activity that has...

An open standard representation of a normative rule (Clause 4.3) from the New Zealand Building Code

Knowledge management in agile software development has typically been treated as a broad topic resulting in major classifications of its schools and concepts. What inherent knowledge is involved in everyday agile practice and how agile teams manage it is not well understood. To address these questions, we performed a Systematic Literature Review of...

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Enhancing evacuee safety is a key factor in reducing the number of injuries and deaths that result from earthquakes. This can be achieved by designing safer buildings taking into account behavioral factors and by training occupants. However, traditional approaches such as evacuation drills cannot be used in buildings in which occupants cannot easil...

This paper presents the development of a framework for leveraging the 3D nature of spaces, their attributes, and sensor location data in conjunction with building management system (BMS) sensor data to allow both users and operators to more easily access building data in the operations and maintenance of facilities. A case study, using data from va...

A retrospective is a standard agile meeting practice designed for agile software teams to reflect and tune their process. Despite its integral importance, we know little about what aspects are focused upon during retrospectives and how reflection occurs in this practice. We conducted Case Study research involving data collected from interviews of s...

Agile project management (APM) does away with the role and the job title of the manager and instead places emphasis on self-organizing teams. However, recent surveys show that the job title of managers, particularly the project manager, is in existence on a significant number of agile projects. At the same time there is very little empirical eviden...

Extracting the right information from Building Information Models (BIM) and Regulatory Knowledge Models (RKM) is a core activity in computer-aided compliance audit processes. Despite many research attempts, however, this has remained a challenging task. One reason is that BIM is necessarily a highly complex model. Representing all components of suc...