
Shuai LiUniversity of Tennessee at Knoxville | UTK · Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Shuai Li
Doctor of Philosophy
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85
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1,973
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Introduction
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August 2017 - August 2017
Publications
Publications (85)
In healthcare facilities, including hospitals, pathogen transmission can lead to infectious disease outbreaks, highlighting the need for effective disinfection protocols. Although disinfection robots offer a promising solution, their deployment is often hindered by their inability to accurately recognize human activities within these environments....
Industrialized buildings, characterized by off-site manufacturing and on-site installation, offer notable improvements in efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and material use. This transition from traditional construction methods not only accelerates building processes but also enhances working efficiencies globally. Despite its widespread adoption, th...
Integrating low-light image enhancement techniques, in which diffusion-based AI-generated content (AIGC) models are promising, is necessary to enhance nighttime teleoperation. Remarkably, the AIGC model is computation-intensive, thus necessitating the allocation of AIGC tasks to edge servers with ample computational resources. Given the distinct co...
Rapid reconnaissance of building damage is critical for disaster response and recovery. Drones have been utilized to collect aerial images of affected areas in order to assess building damage. However, there are two challenges. First, processing many aerial images to detect and classify building damage based on a consistent standard remains laborio...
Detecting objects in hospital indoor environments is critical for scene understanding and can have various applications in healthcare. Deep learning algorithms have proven to be effective in object recognition from images or videos, but the availability of annotated datasets plays a crucial role in their successful application. However, there is a...
Indoor environment has significant impacts on human health as people spend 90% of their time indoors. The COVID-19 pandemic and the increased public health awareness have further elevated the urgency for cultivating and maintaining a healthy indoor environment. The advancement in emerging digital twin technologies including building information mod...
This paper developed a novel deep learning-based approach to processing ground-penetrating radar (GPR) radargrams to reconstruct the occluded interior spaces of collapsed structures and extract essential information such as survivable void spaces to assist search-and-rescue operations. The proposed method innovatively exploits a generative adversar...
First responders often lack information and visual clues regarding interior spaces in disaster rubble, preventing efficient, effective, and safe search and rescue for victims trapped in collapsed structures. Rapidly detecting and acquiring information about the voids in collapsed structures that could contain surviving victims is critical for urban...
This study proposes a human-in-the-loop robot-augmented intelligent system for emergency reconnaissance. The system improves situational awareness of first responders by providing robot-collected information through an intelligent and interactive interface. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) equipped with RGB-D came...
With the emergence of automation and robotics, construction robots have been increasingly introduced to construction projects to relieve human workers from physically demanding and hazardous tasks. The co-existence of and interaction between workers and robots on the unstructured and dynamic sites will pose new safety challenges due to the potentia...
Many vision‐based indoor localization methods require tedious and comprehensive pre‐mapping of built environments. This research proposes a mapping‐free approach to estimating indoor camera poses based on a 3D style‐transferred building information model (BIM) and photogrammetry technique. To address the cross‐domain gap between virtual 3D models a...
Existing disinfection robots are not intelligent enough to adapt their actions to object surface materials for precise and effective disinfection. To address this problem, a new framework is developed to enable the robot to recognize various object surface materials and to adapt its disinfection methods to be compatible with recognized object surfa...
Robotics has attracted broad attention as an emerging technology in construction to help workers with repetitive, physically demanding, and dangerous tasks, thus improving productivity and safety. Under the new era of human-robot co-existence and collaboration in dynamic and complex workspaces, it is critical for robots to navigate to the targets e...
Indoor localization is critical for many smart applications in built environments such as service robot navigation and facility management. Building information models (BIMs) provide new streams of spatial and visual information about building interiors that can be exploited for robust indoor localization. However, previous localization methods tha...
On-demand and real-time building information is of great value to support facility management. Such information can be easily retrieved from an up-to-date building information model (BIM), and then intuitively presented to facility managers or inspectors by augmented reality (AR). However, effective spatial registration into BIM so as to align the...
Educational facilities serve as community hubs and consequently hotspots for exposure to pathogenic microorganisms. Therefore, it is of critical importance to understand processes shaping the indoor microbiomes in educational facilities to protect public health by reducing potential exposure risks of students and the broader community. In this stud...
Jiannan Cai Shuai Li Da Hu- [...]
Qiang He
Practices such as improved ventilation and air filtration are being considered by schools to reduce the transmission of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 that causes the pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Improved ventilation may significantly increase the energy cost of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC),...
Accurate characterization of seismic damage accumulation is crucial to reliable seismic risk assessment. Emerging research efforts have been devoted to state-dependent fragility modeling considering the impact of sequential earthquake excitations so as to better inform the management of structure and infrastructure assets. However, the current stat...
The potential airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2 has triggered concerns as schools continue to reopen and resume in-person instruction during the current COVID-19 pandemic. It is critical to understand the risks of airborne SARS-CoV-2 transmission under different epidemiological scenarios and operation strategies for schools to make informed decis...
In the abstract, the text “which is driven to navigate with the aerial video during an inspection which is driven to navigate simultaneously with the aerial video during inspection” was erroneously stated in the final published paper. The correct statement is “which is driven to navigate simultaneously with the aerial video during inspection.”
The visual focus of attention (VFOA) of construction workers is a critical cue for recognizing entity interactions, which in turn facilitates the interpretation of workers’ intentions, the prediction of movements, and the comprehension of the jobsite context. The increasing use of construction surveillance cameras provides a cost-efficient way to e...
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely accepted for building inspection in recent years. However, the advantages of UAV inspection are not fully leveraged because of the absence of related information to assist decision-making during the inspection process. To address the problem, this study proposes an augmented reality (AR) solution by...
Ground penetrating radar (GPR) has been widely used as a non-destructive technique to detect subsurface objects. Manual process and interpretation of GPR data is tedious and time-consuming. To address this challenge, an automatic method based on a deep instance segmentation framework is developed to detect and segment object signatures from GPR sca...
Ground penetrating radar (GPR) has been used for non-destructive inspection of civil infrastructure systems such as bridges and pipelines. Manually extracting useful data from a large amount of non-intuitive GPR scans is tedious and error-prone. To address this challenge, a generalizable end-to-end framework is developed and implemented to simultan...
Accurate assessment of bridge deck is critical for bridge maintenance and management. Traditional bridge deck inspection methods such as hammer soundings and chain dragging are error-prone and dependent on the operator’s experience. Ground penetrating radar (GPR) is a nondestructive testing technology that can provide reliable and quantitative data...
Microbial pathogen transmission within built environments is a main public health concern. The pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) adds to the urgency of developing effective means to reduce pathogen transmission in mass-gathering public buildings such as schools, hospitals, and airports. To inform occupants and guide facility managers...
Predicting workers’ trajectories on unstructured and dynamic construction sites is critical to workplace safety yet remains challenging. Existing prediction methods mainly rely on entity movement information but have not fully exploited the contextual information. This study proposes a context-augmented Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) method, which i...
Shuai Li Zhiyao Yang Da Hu- [...]
Qiang He
Built environments, occupants, and microbiomes constitute a system of ecosystems with extensive interactions that impact one another. Understanding the interactions between these systems is essential to develop strategies for effective management of the built environment and its inhabitants to enhance public health and well-being. Numerous studies...
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), equipped with a variety of sensors, are being used to provide actionable information to augment first responders' situational awareness in disaster areas for urban search and rescue (SaR) operations. However, existing aerial robots are unable to sense the occluded spaces in collapsed structures, and voids buried in...
Mass-gathering built environments such as hospitals, schools, and airports can become hot spots for pathogen transmission and exposure. Disinfection is critical for reducing infection risks and preventing outbreaks of infectious diseases. However, cleaning and disinfection are labor-intensive, time-consuming, and health-undermining, particularly du...
Incentives can influence travelers' mobility decisions and thus be used to indirectly redistribute traffic demands in space and in time to reduce congestion. This study aims to understand travelers' mobility decisions in response to customer incentives. An online questionnaire survey was conducted to obtain travelers' opinions and preferences on cu...
Accurately mapping and labeling buried utilities is critical to managing massive urban underground infrastructure and preventing utility incidents. However, current spatial information regarding underground utilities is inconsistent, inaccurate, and uncertain, which is a root cause of numerous utility incidents. Information about underground utilit...
Microgrids are localized electric grids that can operate independent of the main grid and help strengthen grid resiliency by working alongside backup generators to maintain electricity supply in the event of a large-scale grid disturbance. This research proposes a single-source capacitated facility location coverage problem (SS-CFLCP) to optimize t...
After natural and man-made disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and explosions, victims may survive in voids that are formed naturally in collapsed structures. First responders need to identify and locate these critical voids for rapid search and rescue operations. Due to the complex and unstructured occlusions in disaster areas, visual and m...
Vision-based techniques are being used to inspect structures such as buildings and infrastructure. Due to various backgrounds in the acquired images, conventional vision-based techniques rely heavily on manual processing to extract relevant structures of interest for subsequent analysis in many applications, such as distress detection. This practic...
Infrastructure privatization leads to the coexistence of public and private sectors in one system. This paper contributes to the body of knowledge by elaborating a public-private duopoly game to address three critical questions arising from the privatization. First, how will the privatization shape the quality and pricing decisions by both the publ...
Financial incentives that stimulate energy investments under public-private partnerships are considered scarce public resources, which require deliberate allocation to the most economically justified projects to maximize the social benefits. This study aims to solve the financial incentive allocation problem through a real option-based nonlinear in...
Public-private partnerships (PPPs) have emerged as a promising alternative to financing infrastructure projects in order to address the infrastructure restoration and rehabilitation challenge. However, in the current practice no unanimous agreement exists on what factors to consider when making capital structure decisions in PPP infrastructure proj...
Compaction is one of the most critical processes in the asphalt pavement construction. Collaborative control of multiple rollers in the construction site to enable each roller to compact the right position at the right time with the right compaction parameters to ensure compaction quality is an unaddressed challenge. There are three technical barri...
This study contributes to the body of knowledge by characterizing the optimal contracts for infrastructure provision that involve the choices of investment timing, price, quality, subsidy/tax, and franchise fee in regulation and deregulation regimes; and comparing the two regimes in terms of social welfare under demand uncertainty and information a...
The information of exact locations of underground utilities is an essential piece of evidence for preventing utility strikes in excavation work. Ground penetrating radar (GPR), which has emerged as a promising, nondestructive solution for this purpose, is capable of capturing radar reflections that are then recorded as GPR scans. To determine the l...
Timely assessment of structural conditions of water diversion ipelines and taking necessary precautions are essential to ensure the operational safety of large water diversion structures. This paper presents an integrated visualization framework to support the safety management of water diversion pipelines. This holistic framework streamlines data...
Cracks are an important symptom of pavement deterioration and deficiency. Accurate and complete information regarding pavement cracks is critical to determining pavement maintenance schedules, methods, and budgets. Two-dimensional (2D) pavement images are used in practice for crack detection and segmentation. Automatic crack detection and segmentat...
This paper elaborates the impacts of government incentives on the private investment behaviors including the choices of investment timing, capacity, and price under demand uncertainty. The results suggest that revenue guarantee, concession period extension, lump-sum subsidy, and unit subsidy can induce timely investment. Revenue guarantee and conce...
Intelligent compaction (IC) technologies yield a large number of data useful for quality control and quality assurance (QC/QA) in the construction of soil subgrade and embankments. A main challenge of using IC technologies for QC/QA is that the empirical relationships between IC data and in situ measurements are not clear, which prevents transporta...
The “2D Detection” subsection of the “Experiments and Results” section should be replaced with the following text:
Fig. 17 shows a set of intermediate results for excavator detection in the cascading process. The detecting process followed the matching order of key nodes. First, five possible boom regions in the blue rectangles were detected. Then...
This paper elaborates the use of project bonds and a credit default swap (CDS) in infrastructure financing under public-private partnerships (PPPs). First, a structural model is presented and calibrated using market data to estimate the default probability of a project company in a PPP project, which lays the foundation for determining the CDS prem...
Underground utility incidents, such as utility conflicts and utility strikes, result in time and cost overruns in construction projects, property damages, environmental pollution, personnel injuries, and fatalities. A main cause of recurrent utility incidents is the noncompliance with the spatial configurations between utilities and their surroundi...
Enhancing workplace safety continues to be a major task in the construction industry. Approximately 75% of struck-by fatalities are caused by inappropriate spatial-temporal relationships between construction workers and heavy equipment. Construction safety can be improved if the location and movement of heavy equipment are tracked in real time. How...
A carefully selected organizational structure paves the way for the success of a construction project by fostering a strong and enduring organizational culture. However, very little research has been conducted regarding the effect of organizational structure on the formation of organizational culture. This research employs the field theory to demon...
A pothole is a severe pavement distress that can compromise pavement rideability and safety and can be the cause of expensive damage claims. The detection and evaluation of potholes are predominantly manual and time-consuming. Although sensing technologies such as global positioning systems (GPS), stereovision systems, and ground penetrating radar...
Monitoring and controlling lift-thickness are critical in pavement construction, because lift-thickness can affect the durability and long-term performance of pavement. Existing methods for measuring lift-thickness are not sufficient due to four limitations. First, the reliability of manual measurements is questionable, since manual measurements ca...
Compaction quality affects the long-term performance of highways, and thus is important in the highway construction. The current practice for compaction quality control primarily relies on the monitoring of rolling parameters such as rolling passes, speed and vibration of rollers, and lift thickness. Soil samples are randomly collected to evaluate...
Underground utility lines being struck is a long-standing problem worldwide, causing public service disruptions, project delays, cost overruns, property damage, injuries, and fatalities that cost billions of dollars each year. Utility strikes are attributed to two main causes: the lack of reliable data regarding the true locations of underground ut...
The radio frequency identification (RFID) technology has proven its potential in locating and tracking construction resources, a critical task in construction project control. However, the main challenge is how to achieve desired levels of locating accuracy. This paper presents an enhanced boundary condition method that incorporates the tag-reader...
Schedules are fundamental parameters for decision making in the design phase of tunnel construction projects. Schedule estimates of tunnel construction projects are subject to major uncertainties caused by uncertain geologic conditions and risks. This research presents an adaptive cyclic operation network simulation (CYCLONE) simulation technique t...
Ground penetrating radar (GPR) is capable of detecting, locating, and characterizing underground utilities in a non-destructive manner. However, processing raw GPR scans to estimate the buried depth and radius of underground utilities remains a challenge in practice, which can be attributed to two main constraints: (1) the necessity of the GPR scan...
Construction sites are rugged, dynamic, and complex, involving a large number of objects that continuously change their locations and occupied spaces. Being able to accurately locate and track site objects site is critical to project management and control to meet the increasing demands for efficiency and safety in modern construction projects. Aut...