Best Paper in Challenges and Opportunities to the Use of Data in Construction
Team News
Departures and returns
The Centre farewelled Research Fellow Dr Ayham Zaitouny, who left UWA and the Centre to take up a research and lecturing position in the University of Doha for Science and Technology in Qatar. Ayham was the first Research Fellow to join the Centre, leading projects with BHP and Alcoa. We are very excited about his success but sad to see him leave.
Several of the Centre's PhD students took well-deserved breaks and travelled overseas or within WA but are now back in Perth focusing on their research: Chau Nguyen (Vietnam), Tim Pesch (Germany), Braden Thorne (South Africa), and Ryan Leadbetter & Sandy Spiers (northwest Western Australia).
THEME 5
Introduction
In theJanuary 2022edition of the newsletter, we described how Theme 5 is working to translate the Centre's outputs into industry-usable software to increase the impact of the Centre's research. Let's check in again to see how Theme 5 has been working with the Centre's researchers and industry partners on some recent translation projects.
Theme 5 Activities
IDEA Tool
In May, Ayham Zaitouny and John Hille demonstrated the IDEA Tool prototype to the Centre's Operating Committee and senior academics.
These demonstrations resulted in valuable feedback on the nature of the questions asked by the tool and on the tool's technical features.
To streamline the tool's use, Theme 5 undertook a minor re-engineering exercise to convert the tool's user interface toStreamlit.
The new Streamlit-based version has many benefits over the previous prototype, including a more responsive user experience.
New-look CTMTDS Website
John Hille and Alex Hunt have been working on a project to showcase the Centre and its researchers. This work includes building a platform to demonstrate the tools produced.
As part of the showcase project, the Centre's public website will soon be refreshed to incorporate outputs such as presentations, publications and software tools produced by the Centre's researchers.
Stay tuned for the transition to the new website in the coming weeks!
Schedule Optimisation Tools
John Hille and Yunlong Li have been working with Hoa Bui and Mojtaba Heydar on improving the schedule optimisation tools. Considerable progress has been made since the start of the year. In addition to the schedule visualiser tool, the comparison and optimiser tools are now fully working prototypes.
Comparison Tool
The comparison tool is a designed to help a user compare multiple schedules. It allows a user to easily compare the duration, number of tasks and overall resource requirements between different schedules.
The tool supports the comparison of manually generated or automatically optimised schedules generated by the optimiser tool.
Optimiser Tool
The optimiser tool provides a user-facing mechanism to exercise the schedule optimisation models produced by the Centre's Theme 3 researchers.
It allows a user to define the following input data:
a set of tasks that need to be scheduled that includes standard properties such as duration, predecessors, and required resources;
a set of constraints on the resources that need to be satisfied in the schedule;
a custom shift/availability definition that lets the user limit the availability of individual resources in the schedule.
Using this input data the user can use a choice of different optimisation models to generate different optimised schedules. Other features of the tool include:
the ability to initialise the input data from from several commonly used formats;
convenient features to validate and pre-process the input data.
The workshop focused on the importance and mechanics of measuring code quality using standard linting tools such aspylint. Andrew and John also introduced some practical approaches to improving code quality.
A/Prof Wei Liu described some of the latest advances in natural language processing (NLP); Prof Melinda Hodkiewicz participated in a panel discussing insights, successes and failures for data-driven decisions; and Prof Michael Small judged the best presentation pitched by UWA HDR students.
The conference focused on why data-driven decisions are essential in generating real-time insights and predictions to help optimise business performance. CTMTDS staff and students who staffed the exhibit got the opportunity to listen to the presentations and panel discussions.
During the breaks, conference attendees visited our exhibit to find out more about the Centre. PhD students Sandy Spiersand Braden Thornedid a great job of explaining their own - and other people's - research to D3 attendees!
Stay tuned for our next issue in August where we will cover:
CTMTDS Newsletter Issue 13, July 2022
This month's newsletter focuses on the activities of Translation Theme 5.
IN THE SPOTLIGHT
Congratulations to Eden Li and Mark Griffin for winning two awards for their conference paper at the World Building Congress 2022, organised by CIB, the International Council for Research and Innovation in Building and Construction! Their paper, Building a data-driven future for construction teams? Capabilities matter, won in two categories:
Team News
Departures and returns
THEME 5
Introduction
In the January 2022 edition of the newsletter, we described how Theme 5 is working to translate the Centre's outputs into industry-usable software to increase the impact of the Centre's research. Let's check in again to see how Theme 5 has been working with the Centre's researchers and industry partners on some recent translation projects.
Theme 5 Activities
IDEA Tool
In May, Ayham Zaitouny and John Hille demonstrated the IDEA Tool prototype to the Centre's Operating Committee and senior academics.
These demonstrations resulted in valuable feedback on the nature of the questions asked by the tool and on the tool's technical features.
To streamline the tool's use, Theme 5 undertook a minor re-engineering exercise to convert the tool's user interface to Streamlit.
The new Streamlit-based version has many benefits over the previous prototype, including a more responsive user experience.
New-look CTMTDS Website
John Hille and Alex Hunt have been working on a project to showcase the Centre and its researchers. This work includes building a platform to demonstrate the tools produced.
As part of the showcase project, the Centre's public website will soon be refreshed to incorporate outputs such as presentations, publications and software tools produced by the Centre's researchers.
Stay tuned for the transition to the new website in the coming weeks!
Schedule Optimisation Tools
John Hille and Yunlong Li have been working with Hoa Bui and Mojtaba Heydar on improving the schedule optimisation tools. Considerable progress has been made since the start of the year. In addition to the schedule visualiser tool, the comparison and optimiser tools are now fully working prototypes.
Comparison Tool
The comparison tool is a designed to help a user compare multiple schedules. It allows a user to easily compare the duration, number of tasks and overall resource requirements between different schedules.
The tool supports the comparison of manually generated or automatically optimised schedules generated by the optimiser tool.
Optimiser Tool
The optimiser tool provides a user-facing mechanism to exercise the schedule optimisation models produced by the Centre's Theme 3 researchers.
It allows a user to define the following input data:
Using this input data the user can use a choice of different optimisation models to generate different optimised schedules. Other features of the tool include:
Code Quality Workshop
Andrew Rohl and John Hille presented a code quality workshop to Centre researchers at the Australian Resources Research Centre (ARRC).
The workshop focused on the importance and mechanics of measuring code quality using standard linting tools such as pylint. Andrew and John also introduced some practical approaches to improving code quality.
CTMTDS AT D3
The Centre was invited to exhibit our research at the Data-Driven Decision (D3) Conference held at UWA on 21 July.
A/Prof Wei Liu described some of the latest advances in natural language processing (NLP); Prof Melinda Hodkiewicz participated in a panel discussing insights, successes and failures for data-driven decisions; and Prof Michael Small judged the best presentation pitched by UWA HDR students.
The conference focused on why data-driven decisions are essential in generating real-time insights and predictions to help optimise business performance. CTMTDS staff and students who staffed the exhibit got the opportunity to listen to the presentations and panel discussions.
During the breaks, conference attendees visited our exhibit to find out more about the Centre. PhD students Sandy Spiers and Braden Thorne did a great job of explaining their own - and other people's - research to D3 attendees!
Stay tuned for our next issue in August where we will cover:
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