This thesis explores the external risks associated with the construction of tailings dams in the mining industry, with a focus on the recent regulatory changes in Mexico. These changes have introduced new complexities and uncertainties in project management, particularly during the tender and construction phases. The aim of this research is to address a gap in traditional risk management methodologies by developing a knowledge graph to identify and manage external risks more effectively, with the specific objective of “How to model an ontology of external risks in the construction of a tailings dam using empirical knowledge”. The scope of the study includes the analysis of external risks in the construction of a tailings dam, and the integration of ontologies to enhance contractors' decision-making processes during the tender stage.

The research employs a mixed-method approach, combining a literature review, case study analysis of the Mexican mining industry, and empirical data collection through interviews with industry experts. The methodology involves developing a knowledge graph using the Methontology approach, implemented through Protégé software. The results reveal various external risks, such as social conflicts, and activity-related and resource-related issues, that impact tailings dam projects. The knowledge graph created serves as a systematic tool for visualizing and analyzing these risks, with validation processes confirming its logical consistency and applicability.

The study concludes that external risks in the mining industry are multifaceted, encompassing social, financial, and resource-driven factors. The developed ontology provides a practical framework for contractors to identify and mitigate these risks more effectively, especially during the tender stage. The research recommends further development and application of ontology-based models in the industry to bridge the gap between theoretical risk management frameworks and practical real-world applications, thereby enhancing the overall risk management process in construction projects within the mining sector.

Although people spend 90% of their time indoors, the issue of indoor air pollution had not gained interest as compared to outdoor until the global Covid-19 pandemic. The pandemic made people and the scientific community realise the importance of good indoor air quality in tackling such health crises. There has been heightened public awareness and stricter air quality guidelines which the facility managers are responsible to address. As a response, they are shifting to innovative approaches and utilising smart indoor air quality (IAQ) technologies available to manage the IAQ better. Various smart technologies and services are available in the market which measure, monitor and report indoor air quality solutions. This research aims to explore: How does the adoption of smart IAQ technologies help the facility managers of Dutch universities and what are the barriers to it? The context is chosen to be university buildings due to the impact of IAQ on cognitive functions and the rising demand for health and comfort in educational spaces. This exploratory research includes theoretical desk research, qualitative case studies and interviews. The current status of different smart technology service providing companies are researched and evaluated. The use and benefits of these technologies in three Dutch universities is explored through the case studies and interviews with their facility managers. The interviews add to identifying barriers to the technologies from the perspective of a facility manager. A cross case analysis is done to compare and contrast the findings. One of the case studies is further investigated to get an in-depth understanding of the barriers to adoption from a different stakeholder perspective. The results show that the adoption and utilisation of smart IAQ technologies, depending on their level, can help the facility managers of Dutch universities in maintaining and enhancing an optimum indoor air quality, ensuring occupant health & safety, and taking a proactive role by making data driven decisions. However, there are several barriers in the process such as lack of knowledge, resources and manpower, conflict of stakeholders, split incentive, security issues and active involvement of facility managers in the process. The research lastly suggests recommendations to overcome these barriers to make use of these technologies effectively and to their full potential.

This study examines improving the documentation and application of lessons learned in tender processes within the Dutch construction sector, focusing on Royal BAM Group. Despite the need for effective knowledge management, challenges like fragmented knowledge sharing and inconsistent documentation persist, limiting organizational learning. Using Social Network Analysis (SNA) and Root Cause Analysis (RCA), the research identifies key organizational, technological, and cultural barriers impacting knowledge sharing. The study proposes a GIS-based application to enhance access to lessons learned across departments. Recommendations include short-term actions and long-term strategies to formalize documentation and foster a learning culture, aiming to optimize future tender projects.

Mumbai,as a rapidly growing megacity faces considerable challenges with its CDWM endeavours. This research is motivated by the unique context of the city, characterised by its highly fragmented construction industry in critical need of government interventions, to promote effective CDWM due to its fragmented, unorganised and competitive nature. This thesis explores the transitioning of the construction industry in Mumbai towards effective construction and demolition waste management (CDWM) from the perspective of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). It seeks to identify the challenges faced by SME’s and propose strategies to enable them to meaningfully contribute to CDWM efforts.
Amixed methods approach was taken, beginning with a literature review to identify barriers and stakeholders involved in CDWM. This was followed by a comprehensive review of international case studies pertaining to Shenzhen, Singapore City and Hanoi to identify international best practices for compara
ble Asian contexts. Semi-structured interviews with stakeholders from Mumbai’s construction industry were conducted to adapt these identified solutions to Mumbai’s unique industry fabric. This was followed by the application of the Socio-Technical Systems (STS) theory framework to investigate the interplay of technical and social dimensions within their relevant environment. This leads to societal outcomes in the form of solutions for CDWM in Mumbai, steeped in its specific context using a phase wise approach.
The literature review revealed that the construction industry in India and by extension Mumbai suffers from; insufficient infrastructure, lack of knowledge and technology, lack of governmental incentives for CDWM,mindsetproblems, lack of enforcement, fragmented nature of the industry, supply chain issues and corruption as barriers towards the adoption of effective CDWM measures. Out of these barriers; the fragmented nature of the industry, lack of enforcement and corruption emerged as the key barriers that serve as stumbling blocks towards the adoption of effective CDWM. Studying international best practices through a case study approach provided solutions that can be divided in to 4 categories,
these are; strong governmental interventions, improving monitoring and enforcement, establishment of a thriving recycling market and improvements in infrastructure and technology.
These best practices were aligned to Mumbai’s unique context through stakeholder interviews and thematic analysis was conducted using the 4 dimensions of STS analysis as the themes. This allowed for the application of the STS theory framework to Mumbai’s construction industry, employing a phase-wise solution due to its suitability to transition projects and the requisite-prerequisite nature of some of the suggested measures. The solution is divided into 3 phases namely; Foundation and Preparatory Measures, Strengthening Implementation and Innovation and lastly Advancing Utilisation and Transition. These measures were suggested with the aim of transitioning Mumbai’s construction industry to largely eliminate illegal dumping, improve infrastructure and technology through collaborative research, improve quality of recycled materials, set up a thriving recycling market and introduce technical specifications for their use resulting in establishing material circularity in the industry. The final aim is for landfilling to be restricted purely to soil with all recyclable materials being recycled and processed to improve material circularity and reduce environmental impact of the construction industry in Mumbai.
The research also revealed that SME’s operating in Mumbai can be integrated positively into CDWM endeavors by improving the enforcement in the industry, providing incentives against punitive measures and enabling them to incorporate material circularity in projects without significant changes to their operating procedures. This cohesive solution, inclusive of all industry sectors, offers a means for the government to integrate, the historically challenging to organise SME sector into CDWM endeavors in Mumbai.

Urbanization is putting more pressure on waste management infrastructures in cities, which could lead to “inadequate and overburdened infrastructure” according to the United Nations (United Nations Statistics Division, 2019). Because people play an important role in the performance of waste management systems, the systems should be inclusive to all people (Vasconcelos et al., 2021). As currently no method suffices in studying both inclusivity and circularity in waste management processes this study proposes the waste journey method.

The waste journey method combines the customer journey theory and the theory of planned behavior and can be graphically presented as in Figure 1. In the waste journey method, the waste is followed from a waste perspective from actor to actor. In this journey the waste interacts with people, called touch points, who take certain actions that influence the circular performance of the waste management process. By mapping the waste management process and analyzing the arguments actors have for their actions, with the theory of planned behavior, the barriers, and opportunities for realizing inclusivity and circularity in a waste management process can be identified.

The barriers and gaps that are identified with the waste journey method can contribute to the improvement of the waste management process. Besides, this method is one of the first to recognize the preparation phase as an important phase for the circular performance of the waste management process. A downside of the waste journey method is that it is a time-consuming method to use, and it requires the transparency and willingness of all actors in the waste management process. This was also experienced in the case study where one of the actors was not willing to cooperate and commercial actors were not transparent about their waste trading contracts. Furthermore, the interview protocol of this research could have been better specified for each actor. Future studies should focus on implementing this method on other waste streams and developing the definition of inclusivity and specifying it for each actor in the waste management process

Facility management focuses on the maintenance, development, and enhancement of physical assets to expand and progress commercial value, as well as the design and upkeep of an appropriate physical workplace for the organisation’s employees and work. Enterprise facility management may be challenging with regionally scattered assets and a high number of assets and stakeholders. Filling stations in the Netherlands are not an exception. The Netherlands had 4,147 gas stations, including uncrewed stations, in 2021. Managers must make everyday strategic judgments as it's "the core of a manager's job" and "essential to organizational existence." Facility managers quickly grasped the value of data in operational and strategic decision-making. In doing so, they have faced various obstacles, including data overload and biases in their conceptualisation, making them inadequately rational. Decision support systems have been used in different forms to overcome the mentioned obstacles. Business intelligence systems are instances of data-driven DSS and refer to a collection of concepts and approaches for enhancing corporate decision-making via the use of fact-based support systems. Often, “business intelligence” software is used to query a database and generate reports. Investigations show that Business Intelligence (BI) dashboards are only used within AECOM for reporting to the client. This study proposes BI and BI dashboards also be used for decision-making. In this research, Business intelligence dashboards were introduced as the successor to the DSS to aid with decision-making difficulties within enterprise facility management. With the objective of determining if the use of BI dashboards in the facility management of filling stations can yield the anticipated advantages. According to the findings of the interviews, the ultimate goal behind decisions is business continuity and growth. Post-experiment surveys show that utilizing a dashboard is only effective if users are educated to make data-driven decisions based on the information supplied. This is known as information relevance, and it is critical for customers to comprehend how the information supplied to them will influence their decisions. Furthermore, the data source must be trustworthy. Also, dashboards could not totally replace site visits in terms of safety. As a result, they may not give the expected value. The dashboard has the benefit of informing clients by providing safety benchmarks, allowing them to detect problematic places and make further decisions. All of the project managers who reviewed the dashboard agreed that it might help reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Using business intelligence to make data-driven facility management decisions improves investment decisions. The Other biggest value of using BI dashboards turned out to be time-saving.

In 2021, many Dutch municipalities have started to transition away from fossil fuel sources towards more sustainable ones in order to achieve the goals set by the Parisian climate agreement of 2015. 2021 was also the year in which a new Omgevingswet was introduced in the Netherlands, in which citizen participation has become a very important pillar (Informatiepunt Leefomgeving, 2021). This, in combination with the increasing prominence of participation in the design field, means that citizen participation processes will be used more and more in projects across the country. Participation processes are processes in which citizens work together with local authorities and industry professionals. However, some challenges do exist in the usage of citizen participation for energy transition projects. One of these challenges is the occurrence of participation fatigue. Here, participants of the participation process become exhausted from working on the project and motivating them to still make useful contributions becomes more difficult. In light of this challenge, the research question this thesis aims to answer is the following: “What are the main characteristics and lessons learned from participation fatigue experienced by citizens in participation processes for public energy transition projects?”. The analysis of both qualitative and quantitative empirical data, resulted in the identification of five major categories of causes linked to the occurrence of participation fatigue. These findings were strengthened further through a quantitative analysis. The five categories were: 1) participation fatigue due to actions of and interactions with local governments and instances, 2) participation fatigue due to lack of results or slow progress in the process, 3) participation fatigue due to the intensity of the participation, 4) participation fatigue due to lack of enthusiasm of fellow citizens or organizations/businesses, and 5) participation fatigue due to lack of serious uptake of participants’ input. The report also delves into the possible solutions towards solving the issue of participation fatigue.

The current built environment is facing a transition from a linear economy towards a circular economy. In this new system, the building parts of today are used to construct the buildings of tomorrow. Reusing building parts requires knowing the qualities of those materials. However, the current AEC (Architecture, Engineering, and Construction) industry does not know what data is required to reuse building components and how this influences processes of modelling and decommissioning parties. Therefore, this research aims to answer the following question: “Which data is needed for circular component reuse and how does this data requirement influence the management of a BIM in new construction projects?” The goal of this report is to construct an ILS (Information Delivery System. Original Dutch name: Informatie Leverings Specificatie) that provides data requirements for reuse of building components.
To answer this question two organisation types are interviewed: linear building organisations and modular building organisations. The linear companies construct projects with a permeant aim whereby building parts are not redeployed in subsequent lifecycles. Modular organisations, on the other hand, construct high-quality modular assets whereby building components and elements are reused a lifecycle. By interviewing both typologies the data requirements and process could be described and compared to construct a new ILS and process.
The interviews expressed the data requirements and structures of both organisations. These inputs are processed and the “Circular Reuse ILS+” and “Circular Reuse ILS+” are constructed. These documents describe data requirements of digital models to ensure that building components could be reused. Implementation of these documents increases the length, complexity, and costs of the design phases since more properties and digital models should be created and stored during these phases. The disassembly phase, contrastingly, benefits from the data and documents prescribed by the ILS+ given that more information is available for the construction of redeployment plans and analysis of the qualities of the released components. During the use phase of an asset, data should be maintained to ensure that it could be reused in future lifecycles. However, the qualities, requirements, definition, and responsibilities of this data maintenance are still unknow. Future research could focus on data maintenance to ensure that all data could be used in a perfect circular world.

The transition to a circular economy requires reducing waste and rework in construction projects. Thereby, the evaluation of building circularity in the early design phase is of great importance. However, due to the current design workflow, such practice is hindered because there is not enough information to evaluate building circularity in detail in the early design stages. An improved workflow to emphasize circularity more in the early design phase is thus needed. This research explores the current workflow and designs an improved work procedure with limited information available by incorporating an automated decision support tool to assess early design phase building circularity, aiming to improve the working efficiency and efficacy. This tool has been designed based on interviews and literature studies, and verified and validated with practitioners. This study serves as a starting point to rethink the workflow to improve circularity with current technological potentials.

Success of the project depends on compliance to requirements amongst other things (Wheeler, 2003). This forms Requirements Management process an important step in the Systems Engineering life cycle. However, poor definition of requirements is an obstacle in automating the verification process. The existing solutions based on various approaches focus predominantly on building codes requirement verification and is not suitable for the dynamicity of client specific requirements. existing solutions also require users to have expertise on programming and construction domain knowledge. Hence, a general approach for rewriting client requirements in a machine understandable way is needed. The research focuses on developing this general approach using object and properties data from standard libraries such as Object Type Libraries (OTL).

As climate change concerns increase, more and more clients are aiming for higher sustainability ratings for their properties. Green building assessments are of great importance to stimulate the sustainable paradigm shift within the Architecture, Engineering and Construction industry. However, the current working process for green building assessments, such as for BREEAM-NL certification, still requires tedious manual work. The application of Building Information Modeling provides an opportunity for automated assessments and real-time feedback. Despite the significant amount of research on technological possibilities of BIM-based sustainability compliance verification, this is not a commonly adopted BIM application. This thesis project aims to address this research gap, by taking a closer look into practice to identify the barriers that are hindering the adoption of BIM for BREEAM-NL assessments and proposing a strategy to further the utilization of BIM for this purpose. The primary contributions of this research lie in the following areas: 1) Investigating the actual status of BIM use for BREEAM-NL assessments in practice and discussing the needs of the industry 2) Integrating the topics of process and policy along with technology in the discussion of BIM-based Green Building Assessments and lastly, 3) Providing a practical strategy to initiate the implementation of BIM-based BREEAM-NL assessments.

The construction sector suffers from flat or sometimes even falling productivity rates while it is one of the least digitalized sectors. A root cause, among others, is poor information management. Recently, the ISO 19650 series have been released to offer the construction industry a guideline for the organization and digitization of information in construction assets when building information modelling (BIM) is used. However, a uniform application of standards in projects is not recommended as it can hamper flexibility and versatility. An essential document of ISO 19650 is the BIM Execution Plan (BEP) which appears more and more often in projects that use BIM, aiming to facilitate information management. However, organizations struggle to set up a process to customize a BEP that fits the project's needs. Therefore, this research focuses on the BIM Execution Plan (BEP) and how this can be tailored to fit the needs of a project. In addition, this thesis focuses on the preparation phase of infrastructure projects where the post-contract BIM execution plan applies. To conduct this study, first, the literature was reviewed, and a questionnaire was distributed to practitioners to evaluate the literature's findings. Next, semi-structured and structured interviews captured the practitioners' perceptions. As a result, influencing project characteristics for the BEP customization were found, mostly related to a) The experience and capability of the involved parties, b) The existence and use of ICT systems in the project, and c) The clarity of the project' and client's needs. The main research result is a) a process for customizing a BEP based on a list of project characteristics and b) a decision support tool that practically captures this process. Both the process and the tool aim to help BEP authors and recommend the extent of development of the BEP contents as per the project's needs. The validation results of the decision support tool are encouraging. More specifically, the tool's results have a small deviation from what experts recommend without the tool.