Digitized goal conflict management in complex projects - Visualization of environmental data linked to health and sustainability effects

Research Project, 2022 – 2024

How can visualization of the environment, combined with health data, in a coordination model support quality assurance during a planning process of infrastructure projects? This is the main research question for this project.

The interdisciplinary project MålVis is part of the larger project MiljöVis II. MålVis concerns management in the public construction sector with a focus on digitalisation in urban development. This is linked to governance and management processes for urban development, which means managing different leadership roles, project perspectives, procurement requirements and planning processes. Urban infrastructure projects can have different owners with different agendas. Different roles with different actors include, for example, clients, project managers, planners, specialists, etc. at authorities, and public and private companies. Examples of different project perspectives in the development of, for example, a railway or a station area include consideration for cultural values, consideration of social or environmental connections to the local environment, and well-functioning buildable solutions.

The project focuses specifically on integrated processes in the early stages of planning, how to integrate different types of data, and on how to use coordination models to simplify quality assurance and ensure safe decisions, especially in complex projects. The development of coordination models in the project enables successive follow-up during the planning process to minimize negative impact and thereby reduce goal conflicts. Target group analyzes are also important for the study.

The project has connections to the competence center Digital Twin Cities Centre (DTCC) through participating Chalmers researchers and the use of the center's Digital Twin platform. DTCC develops the concept of digital twins (digital copy of the planned and physical reality) for cities, based on interdisciplinary research in architecture, technology, project management, data management and integration, mathematical modeling, simulation, visualization and optimization.

The project aims to further develop and scale up digital visualization solutions, which have been developed within the pilot project MiljöVis - Effective representation of environmental information in infrastructure models (TRV 2020/9876) for the parameter noise. In the proposed project, we increase the complexity and develop methods for displaying several parameters simultaneously in a 3D model. We have chosen to focus on the Swedish Transport Administration's three environmental areas air, sound and social consequences in order to create a more comprehensive picture of a situation, to be able to make comparisons and identify goal conflicts between different areas, as well as between different areas and parameters. Such methods will support decision-making, which in turn can contribute to a positive impact on health and increased sustainability. The developed solutions will be implemented in the Swedish Transport Administration's complex object-oriented information models (coordination models).