Artificial Intelligence in Construction Management – a Perspective

Abstract

Efficient organization of construction services seems to be a complex task, limited by the capabilities of human intelligence. During the seventies based on e.g. the development of fuzzy technologies by Zadeh, the rise of expert systems gave new hope to innovative approaches to solving complex situations in project management. As history teaches, since then no real advance could be observed regarding this concept. Nowadays construction and real estate projects have become larger, thus more complex and risky, time schedules have become tighter as have the available budgets. With this the need of support of the organizational challenge has increased significantly. In this context and supported by the presently available computing power as well as on the basis of a presumably complete model of the building including the construction process with an Building Information Model (BIM), the idea of support by Artificial Intelligence has gained importance again and new hopes as well as fears have come to life. Prior to explicit attempts to construct tools for construction management, an investigation of the principal needs of organizational support as well as the possibilities provided by Artificial Intelligence is required in order to prepare the ground for future development. In this paper the principle understanding of complexity based on locality developing into emergent behaviour of the organization of construction projects is presented and mirrored to the expectance towards artificial intelligence operating on a Building Information Model (BIM). This investigation makes use of the theory of systems to model the behaviour of complex systems as well as of commonly used approaches offered by artificial intelligence concepts, e.g. neuronal networks, machine learning algorithms and rule-based decisions within a complex context. On this background the feasibility of improvement in gaining efficiency in construction management organization is elaborated and reviewed. © 2019 The Authors. Published by Budapest University of Technology and Economics & Diamond Congress Ltd. Peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the Creative Construction Conference 2019.