• Energy Research

The relatively low level of sustainability of major public projects has been subject to criticism by the community, increasing the pressure to incorporate the concept throughout the project lifecycle and the importance of understanding the perceptions of affected groups. The study undertook this task by compiling a list from the literature of the sustainability concerns that are associated with major public projects from their economic–social–environmental implications, identifying the relevant stakeholder groups in the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area and their levels of influence by interviews, and evaluating various sustainability objectives from a multi-stakeholder perspective via a questionnaire survey. The results were validated through a series of interviews with purposively selected experts. The study findings indicate the need for more consideration of social concerns in Guangdong province, the proper levels of public participation in Hong Kong in order to avoid excessive interruptions to the pace of project procurement, and that Macao may have to experience a relatively slow development of construction in order to balance the social/environmental requirements that are involved. These findings contribute to both the government and construction industry at large in delivering economically, socially, and environmentally sustainable major public projects in the Bay Area and China as a whole.

The location of temporary facilities in a construction project and the entire site layout plan directly affect project objectives such as time, labor cost, and material transportation and handling. The layout of construction sites also affects entrainment factors such as energy consumption, carbon footprints, and overall construction operation productivity. While site layout planning has been intensively investigated from a project objectives perspective, there have been very few studies of energy-efficiency-based planning, or of the sustainability performance of site layouts. This study developed a green performance evaluation system aimed at improving the sustainability of construction site layouts. The identified factors include six sustainable evaluation categories covering energy conservation and environmental protection, people-oriented principles, construction efficiency, intensity of economic growth, intensity of space use, and the overall control of process. An analytic hierarchy process (AHP) was adopted to determine the weight of each attribute and a fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method was established to carry out the evaluation. The 23 attributes adopted in this paper were identified in the literature; however, the major contribution of this paper is the development of a green performance evaluation system. This system integrates both qualitative and quantitative attributes and provides an overall evaluation of the environmental effectiveness of a construction site layout. The proposed evaluation system was validated with a commercial building project. The average utilization ratio of the case study site was calculated as 94%, and lessons learned are discussed in this paper. The case study analysis identified available site spaces around the building and examined how the arrangement of resources and facilities ensures effective connection between construction activities. The findings showed that the facility’s layout plays a crucial role in energy consumption and green performance. The proposed system will support construction project managers to create high-performance construction site layouts in more scientific and systematic ways.

Buildings are one of the largest energy consumers in the world, and have great energy saving potential. Thermal systems and lighting systems take most of the energy in a building. Comparing with the optimization solutions developed for a thermal system, the research of improving the lighting system is insufficient. This study aims to improve the lighting environment and reduce the energy by optimizing the building design, which has the largest potential for cutting energy economically compared with the other stages in the life cycle of a building. Although many approaches have been developed for building design optimization, there is still one big problem obstructing their successful practices, in that the designers who take the responsibility of making building designs are not experts in building physics, thus they are not capable of calculating the most appropriate parameters and operating the professional software to optimize their designs. Therefore, this study proposes a user-friendly method for designers to improve building designs. Firstly, Building Information Modeling (BIM) and particle swarm optimization algorithm are applied to build an intelligent optimal design search system. The optimized design from this system can largely use daylighting for internal illumination and save energy. Secondly, different types of lighting control systems are compared and the one which can save maximal energy is added to the selected optimal design. A case study demonstrates that optimized designs generated by the proposed design method can save large amounts of life cycle energy and costs, and is effective and efficient.