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The study aims to tackle Egypt's rising electricity consumption due to climate change and population growth, focusing on the building sector, which accounts for up to 60% of the issue, by developing new energy-efficient design guidelines for Egyptian buildings.

This study comprises six key steps. A literature review focuses on energy consumption and efficiency in buildings, monitoring a single-family building in Cairo, using Energy Plus for simulation and verification, performing multi-objective optimization, comparing energy performance between base and controlled cases, and developing a localized version of the Passive House (PH) called Energy Efficiency Design Criteria (EEDC).

The research shows that applying the (EEDC) suggested by this study can decrease energy consumption by up to 58% and decrease cooling consumption by up to 63% in residential buildings in Egypt while providing thermal comfort and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This can benefit users, alleviate local power grid strain, contribute to Egypt's economy, and serve as a model for other countries with similar climates.

To date, no studies have focused on developing energy-efficient design standards tailored to the Egyptian climate and context using the Passive House Criteria concept. This study contributes to the field by identifying key principles, design details, and goal requirements needed to promote energy-efficient design standards for residential buildings in Egypt.

The Government’s investment in infrastructure projects is considerably high, especially in bridge construction projects. Government authorities must establish an initial forecasted budget to have transparency in transactions. Early cost estimating is challenging for Quantity Surveyors due to incomplete project details at the initial stage and the unavailability of standard cost estimating techniques for bridge projects. To mitigate the difficulties in the traditional preliminary cost estimating methods, there is a requirement to develop a new initial cost estimating model which is accurate, user friendly and straightforward. The research was carried out in Sri Lanka, and this paper aims to develop the artificial neural network (ANN) model for an early cost estimate of concrete bridge systems.

The construction cost data of 30 concrete bridge projects which are in Sri Lanka constructed within the past ten years were trained and tested to develop an ANN cost model. Backpropagation technique was used to identify the number of hidden layers, iteration and momentum for optimum neural network architectures.

An ANN cost model was developed, furnishing the best result since it succeeded with around 90% validation accuracy. It created a cost estimation model for the public sector as an accurate, heuristic, flexible and efficient technique.

The research contributes to the current body of knowledge by providing the most accurate early-stage cost estimate for the concrete bridge systems in Sri Lanka. In addition, the research findings would be helpful for stakeholders and policymakers to propose policy recommendations that positively influence the prediction of the most accurate cost estimate for concrete bridge construction projects in Sri Lanka and other developing countries.

The extreme nature of fire makes structural fire engineering unique in that the load actions dictating design are intense and neither geographically nor seasonally bound. Simply, fire can break out anywhere, at any time and for any number of reasons. Despite the apparent need, the fire design of structures still relies on expensive fire tests, complex finite element simulations and outdated procedures with little room for innovation. This paper aims to discuss the aforementioned issues.

This primer highlights the latest state of the art in this area with regard to performance-based design in fire structural engineering. In addition, this short review also presents a series of examples of successful implementation of performance-based fire design of structures from around the world.

A comparison between global efforts clearly shows the advances put forth by European and Oceanian efforts as opposed to the rest of the world. In addition, it can be clearly seen that most performance-based fire designs are related to steel and composite structures.

In one study, this paper presents a concise and global view to performance-based fire design of structures from success stories from around the world.

This study aims to explore the relationship between folk religious place-making and the development of urban public spaces and summarize its influence on community network construction and daily behavior to discover the authentic practices and role of folk faith culture in social space.

Taking Macau's Shi Gandang Temple and its belief culture as an example, on-site research, historical evidence and interviews were used to elaborate and analyze the processes of place-making, social functions, management mechanisms and folk culture to establish a new perception of folk religious place-making in contemporary urban spaces.

The article argues that the culture of folk beliefs profoundly influences urban spaces and the social management system of Macau and has a positive significance in building the local community and geopolitical relations. In addition, it suggests that the participation of folk religious places in local practices is important as key nodes and emotional hubs of local networks, reconciling conflicts between communities of different backgrounds and driving urban spaces toward diversity while forming a positive interaction and friendly cooperation between regional development and self-contained management mechanisms, governance models and cultural orientations.

This study takes an architectural and anthropological perspective of the impact of faith on urban spaces and local governance, using the Shi Gandang Temple in Macau as an example, to complement related studies.

Unlocking the potential of Big Data Analytics (BDA) has proven to be a transformative factor for the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry. This has prompted researchers to focus attention on BDA in the AEC industry (BDA-in-AECI) in recent years, leading to a proliferation of relevant research. However, an in-depth exploration of the literature on BDA-in-AECI remains scarce. As a result, this study seeks to systematically explore the state-of-the-art review on BDA-in-AECI and identify research trends and gaps in knowledge to guide future research.

This state-of-the-art review was conducted using a mixed-method systematic review. Relevant publications were retrieved from Scopus and then subjected to inclusion and exclusion criteria. A quantitative bibliometric analysis was conducted using VOSviewer software and Gephi to reveal the status quo of research in the domain. A further qualitative analysis was performed on carefully screened articles. Based on this mixed-method systematic review, knowledge gaps were identified and future research agendas of BDA-in-AECI were proposed.

The results show that BDA has been adopted to support AEC decision-making, safety and risk assessment, structural health monitoring, damage detection, waste management, project management and facilities management. BDA also plays a major role in achieving construction 4.0 and Industry 4.0. The study further revealed that data mining, cloud computing, predictive analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence methods, such as deep learning, natural language processing and computer vision, are the key methods used for BDA-in-AECI. Moreover, several data acquisition platforms and technologies were identified, including building information modeling, Internet of Things (IoT), social networking and blockchain. Further studies are needed to examine the synergies between BDA and AI, BDA and Digital twin and BDA and blockchain in the AEC industry.

The study contributes to the BDA-in-AECI body of knowledge by providing a comprehensive scope of understanding and revealing areas for future research directions beneficial to the stakeholders in the AEC industry.

The construction industry is facing an enormous number of challenges due to continuous advancements in construction technologies and techniques. Hence, construction management theories have to confront critical newly issues concerning market globalization and construction innovations. The key factor to address these challenges is to ameliorate the competitive abilities of the competing construction firms. In this context, measuring competitiveness of construction firms is an efficacious approach to amplify their competitive growth and profitability. To this end, the purpose of this research paper is to design a three-tier multi-criteria decision making model for competitiveness assessment and benchmarking of construction companies, meanwhile tackling a wide range of essential factors and attributes that covers broad aspects of the present competitive market.

In the first tier, four new pillars (4P) of competitiveness assessment are introduced for construction firms, namely, organization performance, project performance, environment and client and innovation and development. These pillars are able to aid in construction firms’ management on both long and short term basis. Hence, 21 key competitive factors and eighty key competitive criteria are identified, incorporated and analyzed in this research study. The second tier encapsulates carrying out a questionnaire survey in the Canadian and Vietnamese market to garner two main sets of information. The first set of information incorporates responses of the pairwise comparisons between competitiveness factors and criteria. The second set involves gathering utility scores pertinent to each competitiveness criteria. The developed model then leverages the use of analytical hierarchy process to scrutinize the relative importance priorities of competitiveness factors and criteria. The third tier of the developed model encompasses the use of multi-attribute utility theory to compute competitiveness scores for construction companies through blending criteria’ relative importance weights alongside their respective utility functions. In addition, the third tier comprises conducting a sensitivity analysis to derive the most important criteria influencing the overall competitiveness of construction companies. The developed model is tested and validated using three case studies; one construction company from Canada and two construction companies from Vietnam.

Results demonstrated that the developed model has a potential to render a synthesized and methodical performance evaluation for the competitive ability of a given construction company. Furthermore, it was found that Vietnamese companies are more considerate towards pillars pertaining to environment and client while Canadian companies are more attentive towards innovation and development. The outcome of sensitivity analysis revealed that effectiveness of cost management highly affects the competitive ability of Vietnamese companies while effectiveness of cost management exhibits the most significant influence on the competitive of Canadian companies.

The developed model can benefit construction companies to understand their competitiveness in their market and diagnose their strengths and weaknesses. It is also can be useful in efficient utilization of their limited resources and development of sustainable and long-term strategic plans strategic plans, which consequently leads to maintaining better position in their dynamic business markets.

Literature review manifests that reported competitiveness assessment models and practices are not able to address present challenges, technologies and developments in construction market.

Critical Race Theory (CRT) is about understanding and acknowledging when racism has impacted a policy, person, system, and our history. This chapter examines CRT as a tool to understand what has happened in our history and educational system and as a tool to dismantle our current system to bring about true inclusive and authentic schools. It serves to analyze the practical use of CRT in our current public K-12 educational system. The purpose is to fast forward our discussion on race and to explicitly illustrate the dire need for an inclusive education fundamentally girded in an abolitionist mindset for school systems, educators, parents, and students. Although CRT has branched out to be inclusive of many populations, the core purpose was to examine anti-Blackness in America and how that has stained our education system. Inspired by the dissertation conducted by Ayanna Blackmon-Balogun, the aim of this chapter is to draw our attention to that essential purpose of CRT so that schooling can become more liberatory and meaningful to all.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the integration of entrepreneurial spirit and multicultural values in Islamic education, particularly within the context of pesantren, and to understand its implications for educational practices and outcomes.

This study adopts a qualitative research approach, using literature review and analysis of empirical data to explore the intersection of entrepreneurial spirit and multicultural values in Islamic education. It incorporates findings from multiple sources, including scholarly articles, books and empirical studies, to provide a comprehensive understanding of the topic.

The findings reveal that the integration of entrepreneurial spirit and multicultural values in Islamic education empowers students economically, fosters innovation in teaching methods and promotes character development and business ethics. Moreover, it emphasizes appreciation for diversity, cross-cultural collaboration and social responsibility within the educational context. This integration creates an inclusive learning environment conducive to the development of entrepreneurial skills, innovation and ethical leadership.

Generalizability: the findings of this study may be limited in their generalizability due to the focus on specific multicultural Islamic educational institutions, potentially limiting the applicability of the results to broader educational contexts. Sample size and diversity: the study’s sample size and diversity may impact the representativeness of the findings. Future research could aim for larger and more diverse samples to enhance the robustness of the results. Methodological constraints: the reliance on certain research methods, such as surveys and interviews, may introduce biases or limitations in data collection. Researchers should consider using a variety of methodologies to triangulate findings and ensure comprehensive understanding. Time constraints: the study’s timeframe may have constrained the depth of analysis and limited the exploration of the long-term effects of entrepreneurship education on student development. Future research could adopt longitudinal approaches to address this limitation. Cultural context: the findings are contextualized within the cultural and educational landscape of multicultural Islamic institutions, which may limit their transferability to other cultural or religious contexts. Researchers should consider examining similar phenomena in diverse cultural settings. Resource constraints: resource limitations may have impacted the scope and depth of the research. Future studies could seek additional resources to conduct more extensive investigations and analyses. Bias and subjectivity: despite efforts to minimize bias, researchers’ subjectivity and potential biases in data interpretation and analysis cannot be entirely eliminated. Researchers should acknowledge and address their own biases transparently. Ethical considerations: the study may have encountered ethical challenges related to participant consent, confidentiality and cultural sensitivity. Future research should prioritize ethical guidelines and considerations to ensure the protection and well-being of participants. Addressing these limitations in future research endeavors can contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the role and impact of entrepreneurship education in multicultural Islamic educational settings.

Practically, the study informs educational institutions, especially pesantren, about the benefits of integrating entrepreneurial spirit and multicultural values into their curriculum and pedagogical approaches. It offers insights into effective strategies for fostering entrepreneurship, innovation and intercultural competence among students.

The integration of entrepreneurial spirit and multicultural values in Islamic education has broader societal implications. It cultivates a generation of socially responsible and inclusive leaders capable of addressing global challenges with creativity and empathy. By promoting cultural understanding and collaboration, it contributes to building more harmonious and resilient communities.

This study is original in its comprehensive exploration of the intersection between entrepreneurial spirit and multicultural values in Islamic education, particularly within the context of pesantren. It offers fresh insights into how these dimensions can be integrated synergistically to enhance educational practices and outcomes.

Arts-integration is a promising approach to building students’ abilities to create and critique arguments with data, also known as informal inferential reasoning (IIR). However, differences in disciplinary practices and routines, as well as school organization and culture, can pose barriers to subject integration. The purpose of this study is to describe synergies and tensions between data science and the arts, and how these can create or constrain opportunities for learners to engage in IIR.

The authors co-designed and implemented four arts-integrated data literacy units with 10 teachers of arts and mathematics in middle school classrooms from four different schools in the USA. The data include student-generated artwork and their written rationales, and interviews with teachers and students. Through maximum variation sampling, the authors identified examples from the data to illustrate disciplinary synergies and tensions that appeared to support different IIR processes among students.

Aspects of artistic representation, including embodiment, narrative and visual image; and aspects of the culture of arts, including an emphasis on personal experience, the acknowledgement of subjectivity and considerations for the audience’s perspective, created synergies and tensions that both offered and hindered opportunities for IIR (i.e. going beyond data, using data as evidence and expressing uncertainty).

This study answers calls for humanistic approaches to data literacy education. It contributes an interdisciplinary perspective on data literacy that complements other context-oriented perspectives on data science. This study also offers recommendations for how designers and educators can capitalize on synergies and mitigate tensions between domains to promote successful IIR in arts-integrated data literacy education.