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As construction noise negatively affects the health and quality of life of stakeholders, field managers need to properly monitor and manage noise. Thus, the authors developed a model that estimates real-time noise levels at a construction site and the surroundings to enable preemptive responses to noise-related issues. To accurately estimate noise, necessary field data were collected using an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and noise sensors. The noise estimation model was composed of two sub-models: the noise-customized spatial interpolation model and the noise propagation model. The noise-customized spatial interpolation model was developed to estimate the internal noise of the construction site using a few sensor noise levels. Meanwhile, the noise propagation model was developed to estimate the noise level outside the construction site using internal noise estimation results, obstacles, weather information, and noise sources information. The model was evaluated through field tests at a construction technology demonstration center, environments identical to real construction sites in South Korea. The model showed satisfactory performance, with an accuracy of 96.71% and a root mean square error (RMSE) of 2.62 for the internal construction site noise and an accuracy of 96.03% and an RMSE of 2.70 for outside the construction site. To facilitate the usage of the noise estimation results for field managers, the research team visualized the results using the Unity 3D Engine. The results will enable field managers to assess workers' long-term noise exposure and respond to potential civil complaints, gearing up to realize environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals in the construction industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing attempts to automate construction document analysis are limited in understanding the varied semantic properties of different documents. Due to the semantic conflicts, the construction specification review process is still conducted manually in practice despite the promising performance of the existing approaches. This research aimed to develop an automated system for reviewing construction specifications by analyzing the different semantic properties using natural language processing techniques. The proposed method analyzed varied semantic properties of 56 different specifications from five different countries in terms of vocabulary, sentence structure, and the organizing styles of provisions. First, the authors developed a semantic thesaurus for construction terms including 208 word-replacement rules based on Word2Vec embedding to understand the different vocabularies. Second, the authors developed a named entity recognition model based on bi-directional long short-term memory with a conditional random field layer, which identified the required keywords from given provisions with an averaged F1 score of 0.928. Third, the authors developed a provision-pairing model based on Doc2Vec embedding, which identified the most relevant provisions with an average accuracy of 84.4%. The web-based prototype demonstrated that the proposed system can facilitate the construction specification review process by reducing the time spent, supplementing the reviewer's experience, enhancing accuracy, and achieving consistency. The results contribute to risk management in the construction industry, with practitioners being able to review construction specifications thoroughly in spite of tight schedules and few available experts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, human trajectory prediction (HTP) has garnered attention in computer vision literature. Although this task has much in common with the longstanding task of crowd simulation, there is little from crowd simulation that has been borrowed, especially in terms of evaluation protocols. The key difference between the two tasks is that HTP is concerned with forecasting multiple steps at a time and capturing the multimodality of real human trajectories. A majority of HTP models are trained on the same few datasets, which feature small, transient interactions between real people and little to no interaction between people and the environment. Unsurprisingly, when tested on crowd egress scenarios, these models produce erroneous trajectories that accelerate too quickly and collide too frequently, but the metrics used in HTP literature cannot convey these particular issues. To address these challenges, we propose (1) the A2X dataset, which has simulated crowd egress and complex navigation scenarios that compensate for the lack of agent-to-environment interaction in existing real datasets, (2) evaluation metrics that convey model performance with more reliability and nuance, and (3) a guideline for future data acquisition in HTP. A subset of the proposed metrics are novel multiverse metrics , which are better suited for multimodal models than existing metrics. The dataset is available at: https://mubbasir.github.io/HTP-benchmark. [Display omitted] • A new human trajectory prediction dataset featuring high agent-to-agent and agent-to-environment interactions. • Novel evaluation metrics that provide greater reliability and nuance than current popular metrics. • Analysis showing that future trajectory datasets should be sampled at rates higher than 20 Hz. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]