ASCE has honored the writing team of Bharadwaj R.K. Mantha, Ph.D., A.M.ASCE; Carol C. Menassa, Ph.D., A.M.ASCE; Vineet R. Kamat, Ph.D., M.ASCE; and Clive R. D’Souza with the 2021 Collingwood Prize for the paper “Evaluation of Preference- and Constraint-Sensitive Path Planning for Assisted Navigation in Indoor Building Environments,” Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering, June 2020.
The research presented in this paper addresses key research gaps by developing fundamental rules for creating an indoor attribute-loaded graph network and a marker network map, developing a generic algorithm for determining optimal paths (instead of shortest paths) from attribute-loaded networks, and integrating the findings within an interactive user interface. A scenario analysis followed by a usability study in a real physical environment was conducted to evaluate the developed navigation interface. The results demonstrated the feasibility of the proposed navigation system and provided design insights for improving the usability and performance of the current user interface.
Overall, the paper is well-written and provides important insights and fundamental scientific contributions. The research contributes to engineering knowledge and clearly lays out a plan to adopt the findings in professional design and construction practice,
The Collingwood Prize is awarded to the author or authors, under 35 years of age, of a paper describing an engineering project with which the author is directly connected, or recording investigations contributing to engineering knowledge to which the author has contributed some essential contributions and which contains a rational digest of results.
