Saleh Abu Dabous

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Associate) at University of Sharjah

This study investigates the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on travel risk perceptions and shopping habits among individuals in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The study's primary objectives are to analyze changes in travel risk perceptions and to examine shifts in travel behaviors and shopping patterns during and after the pandemic. A comprehensiv...

Purpose This study aims to develop a stakeholder-based framework for successfully implementing solar home system (SHS) programs in the public housing sector of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Design/methodology/approach A mixed-methods approach was used in this study. The literature published between 2010 and 2025 was reviewed to examine existing...

Purpose This research aims to identify, rank and evaluate the impact of delay factors on the timely completion of the handover stage of construction projects in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Design/methodology/approach The study was conducted in two stages. Initially, an extensive literature review and focus groups with industry professionals we...

Upgrading building envelopes with high-performance materials and technologies is essential in retrofitting efforts to improve energy efficiency, aesthetics, and indoor environmental quality (IEQ). Although there has been a significant increase in such interventions, comprehensive studies on their synergistic effects remain limited. This research co...

The increasing complexity of civil engineering demands innovative tools to bridge the gap between theory and practice. Computer-altered reality (CAR) technologies offer immersive environments that enhance learning outcomes. However, civil engineering education lags behind other disciplines in adopting these technologies. This study systematically r...

Efficient management of traffic incidents is a focal point in traffic management, with direct implications for road safety, congestion, and the environment. Traditional models have grappled with the unpredictability inherent in traffic incidents, often failing to capture the multifaceted influences on incident durations. This study introduces an ap...

Purpose Prediction models are essential tools for transportation agencies to forecast the condition of bridge decks based on available data, and artificial intelligence is paramount for this purpose. This study aims at proposing a bridge deck condition prediction model by assessing various classification and regression algorithms. Design/methodolo...

The building sector contributes significantly to the greenhouse effect, generating significant carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions throughout the life cycle of buildings. Traditional methods for assessing emissions, such as software evaluation and site inspection, are time-consuming and do not adequately account for variability and uncertainty in emissi...

Maintaining infrastructure assets at the best possible performance while the available budget is limited has promoted innovative contracting approaches. Transportation agencies have increased private sector involvement through long-term performance-based maintenance contracts or what is called performance-based contracting (PBC). Making budget allo...

This study compares the accuracy and complexity of eleven machine learning classifiers for the problem of incident duration prediction. The proposed framework integrates feature selection and modeling techniques to evaluate the effect of multiple influencing factors and choose the best model for predicting incident durations. Models were developed...

Purpose This paper investigates thermal mass performance (TMP) in hot climates. The impact of using precast concrete (PC) as a core envelope with different insulation materials has been studied. The aim is to find the effect of building mass with different weights on indoor energy consumption, specifically cooling load in hot climates. Design/meth...

Reliable measurement of deformations and crack assessment of concrete structural elements under loading is essential for evaluating the performance and durability of these elements. Traditionally, structural elements are monitored under loading with strain gauges, deflectometer, and data acquisition systems. Limited studies have investigated the po...

Pavement structures are constantly deteriorating due to many distresses, for instance cracks and rutting that are initiated and expanded. Deterioration models of pavement structures is an important component of pavement management systems (PMS). The deterioration of pavements has been extensively modeled using Markov chains. This paper aims at form...

Fatigue cracking is the most common, yet complicated type of flexible pavement distress. Volumetric properties of asphalt concrete (AC) mixtures are considered as key factors affecting their fatigue behavior. Most of available studies focus more on the sensitivity of laboratory fatigue behavior under different volumetric properties, while ignoring...

Façade cladding system is essential contributor to the sustainable performance of buildings. Holistic investigation of building facade cladding performance with respect to the regional microclimate is paramount and can contribute to an under investigated research area. The research aims at analyzing the different building facade cladding systems an...

Purpose This study aims at introducing a method based on the failure mode, effects and criticality analysis (FMECA) to aid in selecting the most suitable formwork system with the minimum overall cost. Design/methodology/approach The research includes a review of the literature around formwork selection and analysis of data collected from the build...

Pavement maintenance decision-making is receiving significant research attention since pavement infrastructure is aging and deteriorating. The decision-making process is mainly related to selecting the most proper maintenance intervention for pavement sections to ensure performance and enhance safety. Several preventive maintenance methods have bee...

Purpose This study aims at conducting a systematic literature review (SLR) to identify the critical success factors (CSFs) for solar home systems (SHSs) implementation in public housing projects. Design/methodology/approach This study is based on an SLR to identify the CSFs for SHS implementation in public housing. It reviewed published literature...

Climate change is undoubtedly affecting the global weather of the Earth. Rapid human civilization has mainly caused this in the last few decades. This research examined the spatial and temporal land surface temperature (LST) in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) coastal cities located in an arid region that faced massive urbanization over the last 50 y...

Buildings are key society element and essential in the formation of sustainable cities. Several studies focused on life cycle assessment of construction materials while limited research analyzed CO2 emissions associated with buildings. This research proposes a spatio-temporal framework to analyze CO2 emissions of buildings applied at the city scale...

Archaeological sites have been subjected to preservation efforts due to their significant historical and cultural value, as well as their vulnerability. Several advanced digital imageries and modeling technologies have been proposed in the literature and adopted in practice to obtain accurate data required to manage and restore archaeological sites...

Education has been one of the major areas disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. This study aims to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on users' (students and faculty members) learning in higher education, examining how engineering students and faculty perceived the abrupt transition in comparison to other colleges. The current research aims t...

Abstract Education has been one of the major areas disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. This study aims to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on users’ (students and faculty members) learning in higher education, examining how engineering students and faculty perceived the abrupt transition in comparison to other colleges. The current resear...

Life cycle cost (LCC) of buildings in the construction sector is an integrated method which is nowadays, the most common method to estimate the whole building cost through the life cycle. The LCC in construction projects is an economic decision analysis process, which assists designers and decision-makers on investments in new construction. Early d...

Traditional full-scale experimental testing of structural elements takes a significant amount of time, effort, and resources. To overcome the abovementioned issues associated with full-scale experimental testing, similitude theory has been introduced by producing a scaled-down model of the original element to be tested. Previous studies examined di...

Three-dimensional (3D) printing is a branch of additive manufacturing (AM) that works by slicing a 3D computer-aided design (CAD) model into 2D layers and sequentially printing each layer additively until the entire object is obtained. There has been a growing interest in 3D printing in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry...

Selection of structural system for new highway bridges during the conceptual design stage is critical to the success of the project and meeting stakeholders' requirements. During bridge conceptual design, a large set of subjective requirements must be considered and evaluated in terms of multiple criteria. In addition, it is critical to incorporate...

Life cycle cost (LCC) of buildings in the construction sector is an integrated method commonly used to estimate building cost through their life cycle. The building LCC is an economic decision analysis process, which assists designers in investments in new construction. Design decisions made at early stages are determining the whole life effectiven...

Growing needs for maintenance, repair, and replacement (MRR) of existing transportation infrastructure signifies the importance of new and innovative contracting strategies. Among the emerging contracting methods in the area of transportation infrastructure management is long-term performance-based maintenance contracts, also known as performance-b...

Deterioration of bridge infrastructure is a serious concern to transport and government agencies as it declines serviceability and reliability of bridges and jeopardizes public safety. Maintenance and rehabilitation needs of bridge infrastructure are periodically monitored and assessed, typically every two years. Existing inspection techniques, suc...

Engineering industry is characterised by a high presence of risks with varying degrees of criticality, which prompts taking appropriate actions to mitigate their impact. The failure mode, effects, and criticality analysis (FMECA) is one of the robust and widely implemented engineering risk management tools. To enhance its applicability in addressin...

Because of the prevalence of risks in engineering industry, the failure mode, effects, and criticality analysis (FMECA) is often integrated with multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) techniques to understand risks and manage risks the related impacts. This paper is a comprehensive review of the literature on MCDM-based FMECA in the major engineerin...

Bridges are important element of civil infrastructure systems as they support the society and the economy on daily basis. In many countries, existing bridge infrastructure is aging and deteriorating. Bridge management systems (BMSs) have been utilized to select appropriate maintenance, repair, and replacement (MR&R) actions to maintain existing bri...

In North America, common practices in bridge condition assessment include visual inspection and nondestructive evaluation (NDE) techniques, and results are reported as condition ratings of the bridge components. Assigning a specific condition rating to the component is a difficult task, especially when the threshold values defining the borderlines...

The vast number of deteriorated bridge infrastructure highlights the importance of implementing efficient and timely maintenance and rehabilitation strategies. Non-contact testing (NCT) technologies are potential tools for bridge condition assessment, facilitating fast and easy measurement with minimal traffic disruption, compared to conventional m...

Pavement deterioration leads to drop in serviceability and possibly failure of pavement sections due to initiation and expansion of distresses such as cracks and rutting. This paper aimed at predicting the future condition of pavement sections based on Markov chain model and the international roughness index (IRI). Developing this model can facilit...

Despite the global trend toward increasing public–private partnership (PPP) implementation in the provision of economic and social infrastructure, published work on the systematic examination of crucial success factors in the housing sector remains limited. Failed PPP projects in affordable housing endeavors in several countries and the relatively...

Pavement maintenance and rehabilitation are expensive activities and the available budget to manage the existing pavement infrastructure is limited. Managers require a prioritization method to assist them in selecting the most appropriate maintenance options. Maintenance prioritization is necessary to maintain pavement sections at acceptable servic...

This paper presents the development of a new model for predicting traffic incident duration using random forests (RFs), a data-driven, non-parametric machine learning technique. Utilizing an extensive dataset with over 140,000 incident records and 52 variables, the developed RF model was optimized by fine-tuning its parameters. The best-performing...

Accurate pavement performance modelling is an essential requirement for cost-effective pavement design and enhances pavement management decision making. Due to the complexity of the pavement structure and pavement response, dominant failure mechanisms may vary depending on the climate region: cold or warm. This study investigated the significance o...

Ranking and prioritizing pavement infrastructure for maintenance and rehabilitation have become major undertakings for several departments of transportation around the globe. This is a complex decision-making problem because multiple and conflicting criteria can contribute to the assessment. Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) techniques evalua...

Purpose This study aims to identify the critical success factors (CSFs) in the implementation of the public–private partnerships (PPPs) in the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) affordable housing sector. Design/methodology/approach A questionnaire survey was conducted to assess 17 CSFs for PPP projects derived from previous international and local studi...

Pavement condition rating is an essential step in pavement management, as it provides the basis for maintenance decisions and budget allocations. The pavement deterioration process is stochastic in nature because several types of distress usually affect performance of a pavement structure. Hence, the deterministic number-based condition indices use...

The present work used the analytical hierarchy process supported by a machine learning technique (namely random forest variable importance) in a geospatial environment to identify traffic-incident hot spots where seven incident attributes (incident severity level, vehicle type, number of vehicles involved, number of weather condition factors, numbe...

The goal of this research is to perform comparative analysis between conventional energy systems (cooling, lighting, and water heating) typically utilized in housing construction and two sustainable models designed based on One Pearl and Two Pearls Estidama rating requirements with special focus on villa construction in the Emirate of Sharjah – Uni...

Several bridge inspection standards and condition assessment practices have been developed around the globe. Some practices employ four linguistic expressions to rate bridge elements while other practices use five or six, or adopt numerical ratings such as 1 to 9. This research introduces a condition rating method that can operate under different c...

Restoration of heritage sites from their remains is a challenging task, as the required geospatial and geophysical data are generally incomplete and complex in nature. These data are typically collected using multiple disciplines/techniques such as GIS, remote sensing, photogrammetry and ground penetration radar (GPR), to record and document factua...

Paper ID-GC23

Keywords: Concrete bridge decks, condition assessment and rating, Quality Function Deployment (QFD) theory, k-means clustering technique.

The growing problem of bridge deterioration globally has imposed prominent challenges on transportation agencies, mainly in terms of ensuring safety and serviceability of the bridge infrastructure. The large number of bridges built during the 20th century has aged and produced a complex decision-making problem that departments of transportation nee...

With a large number of aging transportation infrastructure assets in North America and the growing problem of deterioration across the globe, managing these assets have been the subject of ongoing research. There is an overwhelming amount of maintenance and rehabilitation works to be done and selecting a suitable maintenance, repair or replacement...

Bridge condition assessment is an essential step in bridge management. To ensure safety and serviceability of bridge infrastructure, accurate condition assessment is needed to provide basis for bridge Maintenance, Repair, and Replacement (MRR) decisions. In Canada and the United States, visual inspection is the common practice to evaluate a bridge...

New challenges in management and restoration of archaeological sites require the utilization of advanced technologies and systems to assist in preserving the important legacy of human heritage. These challenges include monitoring and preserving of site landscapes, maintenance and rehabilitation of archaeological structures, and quality and safety m...

Reliable deterioration models for forecasting the condition of bridge elements, systems, and networks are essential components of any bridge management system. Estimating deterioration transition probabilities is the basis of the popular Markov chain deterioration model. Transition probabilities have been produced in the literature by statistical a...

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AHD35 Standing Committee on Bridge Management. Keywords: concrete bridge decks; condition ratings; Weibull distribution; reliability function; deterioration rates; predictions.

Material production, manufacturing, transportation, usage, and end of lifeprocessing are usually the main contributors defining the life cycle assessment (LCA). Bridge infrastructure is important to the economy and the society. Over their life cycle, highway bridges experience several stressors that can significantly affect their structural perform...

Presentation at The Efficient Transportation -- Managing the Maintenance Demand Session Keywords: Infrastructures decision making; maintenance, repair and replacement (MRR); bridge condition prediction; deterioration modeling; Weibull distribution.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AHD35 Standing Committee on Bridge Management. Keywords: bridge condition assessment; maintenance, repair and replacement (MRR) decisions; visual inspection; non-destructive evaluation; Quality Function Deployment (QFD) theory; Wasserman’s normalization technique.

Reliable bridge condition assessment is considered the first step, and perhaps one of the most essential elements, of an efficient bridge management system. This consideration stems from the fact that available assessment inputs are constantly interpreted for maintenance decisions and budget allocation to the deserving, intervention-needy bridges w...

An efficient bridge management strategy emanates from a reliable condition assessment of the existing bridge structures. This includes reporting of defects/distress indicators that may be possibly detected on the various bridge elements. Field inspection of bridge elements is mostly conducted on the basis of Visual Inspection (VI), which is inevita...

Most of the major cities in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have witnessed a rapid growth rate in population during the past two decades, which was accompanied by the development of major transportation infrastructure. This fast growth of the infrastructure and the pressure of constructing more infrastructures in the UAE cities did not allow the loc...

Managing the deteriorating bridge infrastructure has become a major social and economic concern in North America. The methodology developed in the present research consists of three methods: (1) ranking and prioritizing method to evaluate and rank all bridge projects in a network, (2) ranking method to evaluate the available rehabilitation strategi...

Bridge infrastructure health and safety are major concerns for bridge managers. Hence, maintaining bridges within acceptable limits of safety and serviceability is among the main objectives of any bridge management system. This paper discusses three main criteria that can be used to evaluate bridge condition preservation and safety, namely, bridge...

Purpose A bridge network is a major capital asset that requires continuing investment in order to maintain the network within acceptable limits of safety and serviceability. Ranking and prioritizing procedures have been widely used by several departments of transportation to select bridges for intervention and to distribute the available funds amon...

Bridge condition rating is used to make important decisions regarding needs assessment and budget allocation. This study analyzes the use of the fuzzy logic approach to overcome uncertainty problems associated with the bridge condition assessment process. The analysis reveals a number of practical difficulties associated with the application of the...

Bridge management is the decision-making process for selecting and prioritizing the actions necessary to maintain a bridge within acceptable limits of safety and serviceability. The current decision-making approach for bridge management is based on optimizing the life cycle cost of the structure. This is a single criterion decision-making process w...

Managing the existing bridge infrastructure has become a major social and economic concern in North America. This is due to the critical conditions of the deteriorated bridges and the limited funds available to repair their deficiencies. Most transportation agencies make bridge investment decisions based on a combination of some form of quantitativ...

Condition assessment is an essential step in bridge management. Various techniques are currently used during the inspection of a bridge to assess the conditions of bridge elements. Data collected through inspection is used to make important decisions regarding needs assessment and budgetallocation. However, inspection data is at best subjective and...

Condition assessment is an essential step in bridge management. It provides the datum from which bridge management decisions are developed. Bridge condition data is extracted during inspection, which involves the use of techniques to assess the condition of the bridge elements and the extent of defects. This paper reviews published bridge inspectio...

Bridge management is the decision-making process for selecting and prioritizing actions necessary to maintain a bridge network within acceptable limits without exceeding budget constraints. Decision support systems can help engineers and practitioners in making effective decisions through: (1) improved identification and information of the infrastr...

Relaxation is one of the main sources of time-dependent stress losses in prestressed concrete construction. In this research, an experimental investigation of the stress relaxation of the prestressing steel used in construction of the Confederation Bridge was undertaken. Relaxation was measured by monitoring the reduction in stress level in an elas...

Relaxation is one of the main sources of time-dependent stress losses in prestressed concrete construction. In the present study, an experimental investigation of the stress relaxation of the prestressing steel used in construction of the Confederation Bridge is undertaken. Relaxation is measured by monitoring the reduction in stress level in an el...