Research on the Collaborative Application of BIM in EPC Projects: The Perspective of Cooperation between Owners and General Contractors

As an effective way to reduce costs and increase efficiency of EPC projects, BIM technology has drawn a lot of attention in numerous countries. Existing studies have failed to reveal the BIM decision-making mechanisms of owners and general contractors in EPC projects in a dynamic method. This study investigates the underlying logic of the collaboration application of BIM by analyzing the dynamic behaviors of owners and general contractors based on evolutionary game model. The results show that the most effective suggestions to promote the BIM collaboration application in EPC projects are “increasing the proportion of BIM application initially strategies,” “increasing incremental revenue of BIM collaborative application,” “reducing costs of BIM collaboration application,” “avoiding excessive hitchhiking,” and “establishing reasonable reward and punishment mechanism.” On the basis of numerical simulation to illustrate the influence of the different initial strategies and parameters on the final decision in different situations, five solutions were proposed for the effective BIM collaboration application between owners and general contractors. This article can facilitate researchers pondering the dynamics of collaboration among stakeholders in projects, and it can also facilitate participants picking up proper strategies for improved collaboration.

A Collaborative Application for Assisting the Management of Household Plastic Waste through Smart Bins: A Case of Study in the Philippines

The management and collection of household waste often represents a demanding task for elderly or impaired people. In particular, the increasing generation of plastic waste at home may pose a problem for these groups, as this type of waste accumulates very rapidly and occupies a considerable amount of space. This paper proposes a collaborative infrastructure to monitor household plastic waste. It consists of simple smart bins using a weight scale and a smart application that forecasts the amount of plastic generated for each bin at different time horizons out of the data provided by the smart bins. The application generates optimal routes for the waste-pickers collaborating in the system through a route-planning algorithm. This algorithm takes into account the predicted amount of plastic of each bin and the waste-picker’s location and means of transport. This proposal has been evaluated by means of a simulated scenario in Quezon City, Philippines, where severe problems with plastic waste have been identified. A set of 176 experiments have been performed to collect data that allow representing different user behaviors when generating plastic waste. The results show that our proposal enables waste-pickers to collect more than the 80% of the household plastic-waste bins before they are completely full.

Creating Collaborative Augmented Reality Experiences for Industry 4.0 Training and Assistance Applications: Performance Evaluation in the Shipyard of the Future

Industrial Augmented Reality (IAR) is one of the key technologies pointed out by the Industry 4.0 paradigm as a tool for improving industrial processes and for maximizing worker efficiency. Training and assistance are two of the most popular IAR-enabled applications, since they may significantly facilitate, support, and optimize production and assembly tasks in industrial environments. This article presents an IAR collaborative application developed jointly by Navantia, one of the biggest European shipbuilders, and the University of A Coruña (Spain). The analysis, design, and implementation of such an IAR application are described thoroughly so as to enable future developers to create similar IAR applications. The IAR application is based on the Microsoft HoloLens smart glasses and is able to assist and to guide shipyard operators during their training and in assembly tasks. The proposed IAR application embeds a novel collaborative protocol that allows operators to visualize and interact in a synchronized way with the same virtual content. Thus, all operators that share an IAR experience see each virtual object positioned at the same physical spot and in the same state. The collaborative application is first evaluated and optimized in terms of packet communications delay and anchor transmission latency, and then, its validation in a shipyard workshop by Navantia’s operators is presented. The performance results show fast response times for regular packets (less than 5 ms), low interference rates in the 5 GHz band, and an anchor transmission latency of up to 30 s. Regarding the validation tests, they allow for obtaining useful insights and feedback from the industrial operators, as well as clear guidelines that will help future developers to face the challenges that will arise when creating the next generation of IAR applications.

Exploring the Capabilities of Industrial Collaborative Robot Applications

The increase in customization is pushing companies to use more advanced automation technologies in their production lines. Yet, assembly operations are predominantly performed by humans because of their ability to be flexible. The emergence of industrial collaborative robots provides an opportunity to have robots work alongside humans in a flexible and collaborative application. The aim of this study is to explore the industrial collaborative robot capabilities in a collaborative application compared to traditional robot applications. This interview study draws data from four companies with experience in industrial collaborative robot applications. The companies involved in this study experienced that there are several benefits of using an industrial collaborative robot but challenges still exist, in particular related to usability and the robot integration process.