Knowledge and Asset Management in Sustainable Civil Engineering

This special issue aims at fostering the dissemination of high-quality research in methods, theories, and techniques concerning the application of knowledge and asset management in sustainable civil engineering. Similar to that of other special issues, the selection process was rigorous and only articles with good quality could be accepted. We, as editors, would like to thank all of those who had submitted their articles for possible publication. Some articles with good quality were not chosen because they were not definitely relevant to the issue scopes. Some others that were relevant were excluded because some modification work was required. Unfortunately, the stringent reviewing guideline set for the special issue puts us in a situation that we could not accept articles with major revision. Thus, we had to sacrifice these articles although they had the potential to be published in the special issue. Finally, six articles were published in this special issue, which brings together contributions from authors originating from various geographical locations including Australia, China, Korea, Sweden, and Taiwan. This special issue has published four research and two review articles. The article by Y. Liu et al. discusses the use of case-based reasoning and variable fuzzy sets to develop appropriate safe early warning systems for highway construction projects in China. They argue that there is a lack of study of production safe early warning, especially early warning in construction projects. They realize that good early warning technologies can help reduce losses by restricting the possible accident sources and can indirectly lower investment costs by maximizing the benefit from the safety inputs. In their article, they introduce the key technology for safe early warning systems and explain the concepts of association rules, support vector machine, and variable fuzzy qualitative and quantitative change criterion mode. They provide solutions for solving three key issues of index selection, accident cause association analysis, and warning degree forecast, through the above concepts, to improve the highway construction early safe warning systems. The other three articles are related to the application of building information modeling (BIM) for civil engineering projects. Y.-C. Lin and Y.-C. Su studied facility maintenance management (FMM) for the operation phase of the construction life cycle in Taiwan. They envisage the use of BIM to support the maintenance service of facilities depicted in 3D object-oriented CAD. Specifically, the BIM approach is used to store facility information in a digital format, which can facilitate easy updates …