Quality control (QC) is critical for off-site construction (OSC), but it still relies heavily on the knowledge and expertise of inspectors. Projects face challenges involving heterogeneous and fragmented knowledge from multiple stakeholders across different stages, compounded by skilled labor shortage, subjective biases, and human errors. A consistent and reliable approach is needed to guide knowledge-informed QC in OSC, yet currently lacking. This paper aims to develop a novel knowledge-driven framework for advancing off-site construction quality control, empowered by hybrid retrieval-augmented generation (hybrid RAG)-enhanced large language models (LLMs). The hybrid RAG employs a prompt-based approach for entity and relationship extraction to support automated graph construction from unstructured knowledge. Then, a semantic alignment approach is designed to align dense retrieval, sparse retrieval, and subgraph traversal for vector-graph hybrid retrieval, thereby enabling the LLMs to generate more reliable outputs for complex QC decision-making scenarios. Comparative analysis against baseline RAG was conducted on three designed use cases, containing quality information retrieval, quality compliance checking, and quality control task guidance, using three broadly used open-source LLMs, namely DeepSeek-R1-14B, GPT-OSS-20B, and Qwen3-14B. The results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed hybrid RAG in significantly improving model response accuracy, trustworthiness and reliability. This study further demonstrates that medium-sized LLMs can effectively address complex retrieval and generation tasks guided by appropriate approaches. The findings of this study offer valuable insights for advancing construction QC practices, and inform future research in consistent and reliable knowledge retrieval for addressing knowledge-intensive tasks in the architecture, engineering and construction industry.
扫码关注我们
求助内容:
应助结果提醒方式:
