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Structural Integrity
Published in Paul W. McMullin, Jonathan S. Price, Sarah Simchuk, Special Structural Topics, 2018
Structural integrity is complicated, but that’s OK. Embrace it! Oversimplification and ignoring past mistakes lead to things that matter being missed. Civil engineering history is punctuated by things we missed—and sometimes minimized—leading to unnecessary loss of life and property.1 If you embrace the challenge, you may not have all the answers, but you will know more of the questions.
Electric vehicle forecasts: a review of models and methods including diffusion and substitution effects
Published in Transport Reviews, 2023
Cristian Domarchi, Elisabetta Cherchi
ABM offer an interesting methodology to account for the social component of EV diffusion, as individual decisions can be designed to depend on the interaction between the agent and the social network. Social influence and norms, network effects, social communication and the effects of advertisement on innovation diffusion are often included as part of the decision process. Multi-agent models should be appropriate to model all the stages in the diffusion process; however, they require disaggregate information about the vehicle supply market, the energy sector and the government, and their mutual interactions, to define realistic behavioural rules. As these relationships are extremely complex and depend on multiple factors that are difficult to analyse and predict, there is a risk of behavioural oversimplification, especially when detailed information is limited or unavailable.
Responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in the construction industry: a literature review of academic research
Published in Construction Management and Economics, 2023
Frank Ato Ghansah, Weisheng Lu
Second, oversimplification and unclarity with resilient activities were noticed as limitations of existing studies due to the weaknesses of the research methods adopted. Oversimplification may occasionally work well, but the intricacies should not be overlooked. Upon the review, it is made clear by Araya (2022) that the proposed framework based on the agent-based modelling approach is a simplification of real-life conditions in construction projects, and no specific set of skills was discussed in the proposed model. This imposes a limitation that needs to be acknowledged in their study, though it is necessary to simplify real-life conditions by making assumptions about agents’ behaviours. This oversimplifies real-life conditions, such as the process of contagion among workers regarding the modelling of multiple working shifts and the use of multi-skilled workers in construction organisations (Araya 2021a,b). This causes obscurity in understanding the detailed dynamics of the working practices of the workforce in construction firms. Another limitation relates to the unclear and lack of specificity regarding the multi-skilled workers in their model (Araya 2021a,b). The proposed model did not refer to any clear and specific set of skills for construction workers, which may be reduced to the specificity of findings. Given the international scope of the pandemic, it is important to develop models and tools that can improve the management of the construction workforce against the pandemic by providing clear, specific, adaptable, and transferrable solutions to multiple construction contexts. Hence, robust methodologies/research methods with a high precision rate to real-life conditions can be engaged further to investigate and analyse the dynamics of workforce activities in construction firms without missing the clarity of actions in ensuring resilience amid the pandemic crisis.