PhD Oral Exam - Farzaneh Zarei, Civil Engineering

When studying for a doctoral degree (PhD), candidates submit a thesis that provides a critical review of the current state of knowledge of the thesis subject as well as the student’s own contributions to the subject. The distinguishing criterion of doctoral graduate research is a significant and original contribution to knowledge.

Once accepted, the candidate presents the thesis orally. This oral exam is open to the public.

Abstract

Digitalization of infrastructure (also known as smart infrastructure or ‘smart city’) is based upon capturing and analyzing urban data and providing decision-makers with real-time analytics and insights. However, since some features of the built environment, such as citizens’ comfort, cannot be solely measured by physical sensors, there is a need for alternative tools and methods to evaluate such aspects and record the results. Employing the end-users of infrastructure services, which are distributed through the same pattern as the infrastructure network and frequently interact with the infrastructure services, can be considered as a solution to this challenge. With such a high-level goal, in this dissertation, the streams of urban data provided by external and internal stakeholders (i.e., service end-users and decision-makers, respectively) of the urban spaces are integrated with 3D city models to enrich urban information models with additional layers of data related to the infrastructure performance. For this aim, a new Application Domain Extension (ADE) is developed and tested to enrich city digital twins with social inputs. The syntax of the Social ADE was transformed into a formal data schema, and then the syntax of the corresponding data schema was validated. Also, the semantics of the proposed ADE is validated through two case studies. The first case study investigates how the physical features of the built environment, including the static geometrical, spatial, and construction information, and dynamic data related to the service provided by it affect the comfort of service users. Most specifically, this case study is focused on acoustic comfort and measures the sensory information, including the traffic noise level at bus stops, through cell phones carried by the travellers. Then, this information was cross-examined with travellers’ attributes and their sensation level (reported through online surveys) and the physical characteristics of the street and bus stop (captured in the Geographic Information System – GIS).

The second case study presents a GIS system method that integrates technical and social aspects of the road network to uncover hidden patterns and correlations among past decisions. This approach distills collective knowledge to make informed decisions in the future for the specific case study of prioritizing potholes to be repaired. As a result, it is seen that informative streams of information are generated by mining the data stored using the proposed data schema and ADE. Our experiments show that the Social ADE can successfully link information from the built environment with the end users’ knowledge, thereby enabling a plethora of socially-driven innovative solutions.