Automated compliance checking (ACC) is increasingly adopted across planning, building control and environmental certification contexts, but its practical realization varies in ways that remain poorly understood. Authorities and practitioners face uncertainty about when and under what conditions ACC outputs can be trusted as inputs to regulatory decisions. Prior research emphasizes data readiness and auditability but offers little cross-context analysis of how implementation patterns diverge. A multi-case comparative study of ACC implementations across European regulatory settings is conducted, using artefact-centred reconstruction (models, rules, execution logs) and structured stakeholder feedback. Cases are analysed through three lenses: implementation architecture, evidentiary configuration, and governance and adoption. Implementations take different forms depending on the evidentiary configuration embedded in the regulation. Checks are most explainable when evidence representation and execution engine are structurally aligned. Data readiness and provenance function as configuration-specific governance mechanisms, and adoption is strongest where services achieve workflow integration, service-level maturity, and clear allocation of responsibility. The study contributes a comparative evidentiary-configuration lens, articulates evidence-engine alignment as a structural condition for explainability, and reframes data readiness and provenance as governance mechanisms. These insights imply that operationalizing ACC requires treating evidentiary requirements, provenance, and responsibility allocation as part of regulatory service design.
As population aging intensifies, improving the aging-friendly level of residential environments for older adults has become an important issue. In indoor environments, behavioural trajectories are closely associated with spatial layout, and frequent turning increases physical burden. However, existing studies mainly focus on behaviour recognition and anomaly detection, lacking quantitative trajectory analysis and its integration with spatial evaluation. To address this gap, this study proposes a quantitative and classification method for behavioural trajectories of older adults and establishes a trajectory-based framework for residential space evaluation and optimization. A Segmented Perpendicular Distance Deviation method is introduced for turning detection and feature extraction. Four indicators are constructed, including perpendicular distance, path length, turning frequency and curvature coefficient. Trajectories are classified into four categories: go straight, small turn, moderate turn and big turn. K-means clustering is applied to achieve objective classification, with classification accuracy exceeding 91%. The method is validated using Binhu Yayuan. The results demonstrate that reducing turning frequency, path length and the proportion of big turns can significantly improve aging-friendly performance. In addition, linear topology, shorter distances between activity nodes, and reduced island-type furniture arrangements contribute to smoother movement trajectories.
The shift toward hybrid working has increased the importance of understanding the environmental quality of home-based workspaces in comparison with professionally designed healthy offices. Indoor environmental factors such as air quality, thermal comfort, lighting, and noise are known to influence human health and productivity, yet systematic comparisons between these two settings remain limited. This study aimed to evaluate the home working environments relative to a healthy office. A repeated-measures study design was employed in which 67 participants experienced both home and controlled office conditions, with continuous objective monitoring of indoor environmental quality parameters and parallel subjective assessments. Results showed that home environments exhibited significantly higher levels of carbon dioxide, particulate matter, and volatile organic compounds (p < 0.05). Lighting levels were also significantly lower and more variable in homes (p < 0.05). Among the environmental parameters, lighting demonstrated the strongest negative associations with satisfaction, whereas pollutant levels were not significantly related to perceived air quality. The study contributes new evidence on the quality of home workspaces relative to healthy office environments and underscores the importance of objective measurement and thoughtful design strategies to support health, comfort, and performance in evolving work arrangements.
This work from the AGORA project is framed within the need to increase the local energy autonomy and resilience of buildings to deal with critical events, such as the blackout of the electricity grid in Spain in 2025. It proposes to energetically renovate the heating system of a university building and to quantify the improvement of autonomy in thermoeconomic terms. The proposed system incorporates a hybrid heat pump with photovoltaic and autonomous control, and is evaluated, including the validated model of the building based on monitoring data. Based on the thermoeconomic results, the new system reduces energy consumption from 28,000 to 10,000 kWhex/year, with a renewable contribution of 36%. The average annual unit cost decreases from 807 to 575 c & euro;/kWhex, and CO2 emissions by 54%. These results confirm an improvement in efficiency, sustainability and energy sovereignty compared to the conventional system. The thermoeconomic approach highlights the adaptation of the different qualities of each exergy flow and is applicable to achieve energy sovereignty of buildings, to minimize the dependence on external resources and to favour local consumption. Furthermore, these applications implemented in renewable technologies allow the sustainability of systems to be assessed, contributing to a wider energy transition and climate change mitigation.
In recent years, rising global flood frequency has made urban flood resilience evaluation urgent. However, existing reviews are outdated and lack a comprehensive synthesis of the latest research developments. Based on the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses (PRISMA) guidelines, this study analysed 220 publications published between 2015 and 2025. A comprehensive analysis was conducted across dimensions, including publication trends, keyword evolution, research scale, method, framework and evaluation indicators. Key findings include the following: (1) The number of publications in this field has been increasing annually, reaching a peak of 67 in 2025. (2) Research themes are gradually shifting from traditional disaster prevention and mitigation towards systematic urban flood resilience management. (3) Research scales encompass macro, meso and micro levels. Quantitative research methods accounted for the largest proportion at 53.6%, progressively integrating mixed methodologies. A multidimensional resilience evaluation framework has been established, incorporating social, ecological and technological dimensions. (4) Social resilience focuses on resident conditions, local economy and emergency organizations; ecological resilience emphasizes natural environment and flood disasters; technological resilience encompasses both infrastructure and disaster prevention technology. This study helps government administrators to better understand resilience and can serve as a reference for enhancing urban flood resilience.
Urban planning and digital building permitting typically operate within separate silos, with zoning intent mostly embedded in documents and not directly usable within automated digital building permitting. This study addresses the discontinuity between document-based land use planning and information-model-based building design and permitting by proposing the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC)-based Spatial Planning Information Model (SPIM) as a structured, machine-interpretable baseline used across planning, participation and building permitting workflows. To address the identified problem, this study is organized according to Action Design Research methodology. SPIM is specified as an IFC-based representation of zoning conditions, and the results show how controlled authoring conventions, template-based semantics and publication in municipal geospatial environments enable traceable reuse beyond the authoring tool. The demonstrations indicate that planning, participation, building permitting workflows and early-stage environmental analyses can be integrated for decision support. Simultaneously, the study provides novel evidence that technology is not the only barrier to adoption, as operationalization depends on societal and institutional readiness, including data governance, accountability for maintaining authoritative inputs and transparent outputs with agreed review and dispute-resolution procedures. The study concludes by listing the implications for municipalities and standardization, including short-term profiling and a longer-term case for explicit planning-domain concepts in open standards.
Digitalization is transforming building permit systems, especially in China, yet the determinants of sustained engagement with algorithm-driven platforms remain unclear. This study examines how algorithmic transparency and perceived AI fairness influence continuance intention, with algorithmic trust and perceived information control as mediators, and AI literacy and institutional trust as moderators. Survey data from 468 Chinese construction professionals were analysed using PLS-SEM. Results show that transparency and fairness significantly enhance trust and control, which in turn predict continuance intention. Mediation confirms trust and control as critical pathways from design to sustained use. Moderation reveals that AI literacy strengthens the transparency-trust link, and institutional trust amplifies the trust-continuance relationship. These findings extend technology acceptance and algorithmic governance theories by demonstrating how design, competence and institutional context jointly shape behaviour in regulatory settings. For policymakers and designers, this highlights the need for transparent algorithms, user control features and legitimate institutions to build accepted digital building permit systems.
This research examines the integration of CNC-fabricated plywood installations with algorithmically positioned climbing plants to address localized microclimatic challenges in confined urban spaces. Conducted in a poorly ventilated courtyard in Gda & nacute;sk, Poland, the study investigates air temperature and relative humidity from June to September, comparing conditions within the installation with those in adjacent unshaded areas and at a municipal weather station. The algorithmic method integrates site-specific environmental parameters, such as solar exposure, temperature gradients and soil moisture, with species-specific ecological requirements to optimize plant positioning, with plant health and long-term viability as the primary objectives and microclimatic modification through shading and evapotranspiration as secondary outcomes. Measurements indicate consistent increases in relative humidity and modest, seasonally dependent reductions in air temperature near the installation, alongside substantial day-to-day variability typical of urban microclimates. As these effects are site-specific and derived from a single, short-term study without extended pre-installation baselines or comprehensive meteorological variables, the findings are interpreted as evidence of local microclimatic moderation rather than urban heat-island mitigation. The research contributes to urban climate adaptation by demonstrating the integration of computational design, digital fabrication and ecological principles, and by offering a replicable framework for data-driven, small-scale green infrastructure design in space-constrained environments.
Curtain wall fa & ccedil;ades contribute substantially to upfront embodied carbon in new buildings, and early design choices constrain long-term decarbonization options. Many jurisdictions are introducing embodied-carbon caps or carbon pricing; designers still lack tools that link these policy drivers to early fa & ccedil;ade decisions. This study develops an integrated concept-stage workflow linking BIM-based curtain wall modelling, life-cycle carbon assessment, a fa & ccedil;ade circularity indicator, discounted life-cycle costing, deterministic optimization and Monte Carlo uncertainty analysis. Fa & ccedil;ade quantities were derived from eight curtain wall panel models in Autodesk Revit, embodied-carbon factors from Australian Environmental Product Declarations (EPD) and the Environmental Performance in Construction (EPiC) database in One Click LCA, and private-cost from the project's dataset and normalized to AUD/m & sup2;. Deterministic optimization indicates that carbon prices of approximately 100-420 AUD/tCO(2)e shift optimal solutions from aluminium-intensive to higher-circularity timber-hybrid systems, reducing fa & ccedil;ade life cycle global warming potential (LC-GWP) from approximately 380-400 kgCO(2)e/m & sup2; to 270-300 kgCO(2)e/m & sup2; with modest cost increases. Monte Carlo simulations confirm that outcomes are largely governed by the carbon price level rather than price-path uncertainty, with limited cost risk. The workflow enables design teams to test fa & ccedil;ade options under explicit policy scenarios and align concept-stage decisions with net-zero and circular-economy goals.
Germany needs to steeply upgrade the energy performance of its older residential buildings to meet net zero CO2 goals by 2045. While there are many societal and environmental benefits of energy performance upgrading that need to be considered, it is also important to reliably estimate the monetary costs of renovating these buildings and the direct financial benefits through energy cost savings and CO2 tax savings. This is a complex task due to the heterogeneity of the residential building stock. As a first step, this paper focuses on a specific class of building that is relatively uniform and widely present in western Germany (the pre-reunification Federal Republic of Germany): four storey 1949-1978-era apartment buildings. The analysis uses 2022 census data, a large database of building characteristics from Immoscout24, and case studies focusing on an exemplar building of this class in the city of Aachen. It finds a shortfall in benefits over costs of 33-57 billion EUR, depending on the energy standard aimed for. This represents 0.78% - 1.58% of western Germany's 2024 GDP, though this would be spread over 20 years. However, it is only a fraction of total monetary losses if all substandard buildings in all classes are upgraded.
A planning permit is required before starting any construction. It involves a comprehensive review by authorities to ensure compliance with planning and building regulations. In Saudi Arabia, this process plays a crucial role in regulating urban development - the urban population is growing, with consequent increased demand for housing and a rise in planning permit applications. This places significant pressure on municipal authorities to process applications, currently a relatively slow process owing to inefficiencies in traditional workflows and the labour-intensive nature of the review process. Work is underway to improve the situation, as part of Saudi Arabia's 'Vision 2030', which includes objectives for digital transformation and efficient governance. This study investigates these new developments and compares the new approaches with those from several European countries, to understand similarities and differences, and in particular, identify best practices and commonalities for future processes and systems development. Document analysis and semi-structured interviews are combined to determine procedural structures, stakeholder roles and business rules, which are then embedded into an established framework to facilitate comparison. The results provide a systematic, comparable description of the planning permit process of Saudi Arabia, and derive lessons learned from the comparison on process organization and digitalization.
The evaluation of buildings in operation is essential for improving indoor environmental quality and advancing sustainability. However, traditional post-occupancy evaluation (POE) methods are typically designed for adults, often overlooking children's perspectives. This study integrates architectural science with creative, qualitative approaches to recognise children as active agents in shaping their environments. Focusing on primary school children (ages 5-11), it explores how they perceive and understand the indoor environment in their classrooms, as well as the strategies they use to achieve thermal comfort. Children expressed their sensory experiences and adaptive actions through drawings and group discussions, while the research team collected in-situ measurements of temperature and carbon dioxide in the classrooms. The findings reveal how children articulate (dis)comfort, perceive their ability to influence their surroundings, and employ adaptive strategies at both personal and environmental levels. Children's reported comfort generally aligned with measured temperatures in summer, although the relationship between their perceptions of air quality and measured carbon dioxide levels was less clear. This research demonstrates the value of child-centred approaches for evaluating indoor environments. Such methods not only enhance understanding of children's comfort but also support environmental education, empowering children and teachers to co-create healthier, more comfortable learning spaces.
Emergency Department (ED) staff must rapidly adapt in response to Mental and Behavioral Health (MBH) patient needs. The purpose of this study was to compare two ED exam room design proposals (parallel and perpendicular bed positions) developed to address the need for flexibility and safety in the ED. Simulation-Based Evaluation (SBE) in Virtual Reality (VR) was conducted to evaluate ED staff perceptions of safety, effectiveness, and patient experience in the room at an early design stage. Twenty-seven ED staff members with experience managing MBH patients performed tasks in VR following a scripted scenario that consisted of a nurse caring for an MBH patient with an arm injury, verbalizing their feedback and experiences for both designs. Surveys and debriefing interviews were conducted to gather further insights. This study found that staff members evaluated the perpendicular bed position as safer for all users and afforded a more efficient workflow; Participants valued several features of the overall room design, including: (i) customizable room controls, (ii) sensory-friendly environment and (iii) flexible features, which allowed for a rapid transition from a medical to an MBH room. SBE confirmed that the perpendicular bed position was preferred by staff, and the findings guided future refinements.
Despite most people spending the majority of their time indoors, especially at work, the impact of indoor environments on productivity remains largely unmeasured. While decarbonization efforts prioritize environmental benefits, their unintended effects on indoor environmental quality and worker productivity have not been fully assessed through both objective and subjective methods. This study is the first to examine the relationship between indoor environmental quality, well-being, and productivity, using both forms of measurement. Volunteers experienced 12 hygrothermal (temperature and relative humidity) conditions in a simulated office at the University of Bath's VSimulator. Cognitive tests and questionnaires assessed productivity. A mixed-effects model evaluated the influence of these conditions, alongside participant characteristics, such as sex, geographical background, and first language. Results showed that both objective and subjective productivity followed inverted-U-shaped patterns, declining when temperatures deviated from optimal levels. Notably, the optimal range was broader for objective than subjective measures, indicating that people may feel discomfort without it reducing their performance. While relative humidity alone had no significant effect, its combination with temperature influenced self-reported productivity. These findings underscore the importance of optimizing indoor environments to support both subjective and objective productivity, carrying major financial implications for organizations.
This paper presents an exploratory investigation into how atrium design is associated with users' visual and emotional experiences. Focussing on spatial configuration and material qualities, the study integrates wearable eye-tracking with place attachment assessment to examine how users engage with real atrium environments. Thirty university students participated in on-site eye-tracking experiments measuring fixation duration, visit count, pupil diameter and time to first fixation, followed by a questionnaire on spatial familiarity and place attachment. Statistical comparisons and a random forest model were used to identify behavioural differences and indicative predictive patterns. Results suggest that participants with higher place attachment and familiarity exhibited more focussed attention, longer fixations and larger pupil diameters, potentially reflecting deeper emotional engagement. In contrast, low attachment and unfamiliar users demonstrated more exploratory and dispersed gaze patterns. The random forest classifier achieved an average accuracy of 62.6% in distinguishing high and low place attachment groups, indicating preliminary potential for linking gaze features, particularly pupil diameter and early visual attention, to emotional engagement. These findings underscore the value of visual metrics and psychological measures to understand how atrium design supports user experiences. They provide practical insights for architects seeking to enhance emotional connection through spatial openness and material articulation in higher-education environments.
