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).
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, attendees of the conference visited our exhibition to ask questions. PhD students Sandy Spiersand Braden Thorne did a great job explaining their own - and other people's - research to D3 attendees!
THEME 5
Introduction
In the 2022Januaryedition of the newsletter for 2022, we introduced the work that Theme 5 is working on to translate the Centre's outputs into industry-usable software to increase the impact of the Centre's research.
Let's check out how Theme 5 has been working with the Centre's researchers and industry partners on translating the following projects:
Theme 5 Activities
IDEA Tool
In May, Ayham Zaitouny and John Hille demonstrated the IDEA Tool prototype to the Centres Operating Committee and senior academics.
These demonstrations resulted in valuable feedback on the nature of the questions asked by the tool and the importance of some of the tool's technical features.
To help deliver these changes, Theme 5 undertook a minor re-engineering exercise to convert the tools' user interface toStreamlit.
The new Streamlit based version of the tool has many benefits over the previous prototype, including a more responsive user experience.
CTMTDS Website Refresh
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 a culmination 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 Centres 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 the improving the schedule optimisation tools project and a lot of progress has been made since the last Theme 5 update.
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 at a time. 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. Letting 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 demonstrated the importance and the mechanics of measuring code quality using standard linting tools such aspylint. Andrew and John also introduced some practical approaches to improving code quality.
The workshop was attended by the Centre's PhD students and Research Fellows.
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
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, attendees of the conference visited our exhibition to ask questions. PhD students Sandy Spiers and Braden Thorne did a great job explaining their own - and other people's - research to D3 attendees!
THEME 5
Introduction
In the 2022 January edition of the newsletter for 2022, we introduced the work that Theme 5 is working on to translate the Centre's outputs into industry-usable software to increase the impact of the Centre's research.
Let's check out how Theme 5 has been working with the Centre's researchers and industry partners on translating the following projects:
Theme 5 Activities
IDEA Tool
In May, Ayham Zaitouny and John Hille demonstrated the IDEA Tool prototype to the Centres Operating Committee and senior academics.
These demonstrations resulted in valuable feedback on the nature of the questions asked by the tool and the importance of some of the tool's technical features.
To help deliver these changes, Theme 5 undertook a minor re-engineering exercise to convert the tools' user interface to Streamlit .
The new Streamlit based version of the tool has many benefits over the previous prototype, including a more responsive user experience.
CTMTDS Website Refresh
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 a culmination 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 Centres 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 the improving the schedule optimisation tools project and a lot of progress has been made since the last Theme 5 update.
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 at a time. 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 at the Australian Resources Research Centre (ARRC).
The workshop demonstrated the importance and the mechanics of measuring code quality using standard linting tools such as pylint . Andrew and John also introduced some practical approaches to improving code quality.
The workshop was attended by the Centre's PhD students and Research Fellows.
Stay tuned for our next issue in August where we will cover:
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