Formalising Autonomous Construction Sites with the Help of Abstract Mathematics

Abstract

With the rapid development of modern technologies, autonomous or robotic construction sites are becoming a new reality in civil engineering. Despite various potential benefits of the automation of construction sites, there is still a lack of understanding of their complex nature combining physical and cyber components in one system. A typical approach to describing complex system structures is to use tools of abstract mathematics, which provide a high level of abstraction, allowing a formal description of the entire system while omitting non-essential details. Therefore, in this paper, autonomous construction is formalised using categorical ontology logs enhanced by abstract definitions of individual components of an autonomous construction system. In this context, followed by a brief introduction to category theory and ologs, exemplary algebraic definitions are given as a basis for the olog-based conceptual modelling of autonomous construction systems. As a result, any automated construction system can be described without providing exhausting detailed definitions of the system components. Existing ologs can be extended, contracted or revised to fit the given system or situation. To illustrate the descriptive capacity of ologs, a lattice of representations is presented. The main advantage of using the conceptual modelling approach presented in this paper is that any given real-world or engineering problem could be modelled with a mathematically sound background.