Potentials of artificial intelligence in construction management

Abstract

Abstract Artificial intelligence (AI) approaches have been developed since the upcoming of Information Technologies beginning in the 1950s. With rising computing power, the discussion of AI usefulness has been refuelled by new powerful algorithms and, in particular, the availability of the internet as a vast resource of unstructured data. This gives hope to construction management in particular, since construction projects are recently becoming larger and more complex, i.e. encompassing more and more participants focusing on diverging interests while the given frames of time and budget are getting tighter. Finally, construction management is used to establish an efficient organisation of all these issues and able to predict the result with a high degree of precision and certainty. This could be accomplished by the human mind when projects were smaller, but with the recent development human mind is clearly pushed to its limits. On this background, the possible support of AI to organisational tasks needs to be investigated on a theoretical level prior to developing tools. This paper is the extended version of the article ‘Artificial Intelligence in Construction Management – a Perspective’, presented at the Creative Construction Conference 2019 where the algorithmic and entropic scope of AI is investigated in the context of construction management. However, efficient organisation is about restructuring systems into a set of well-separated subsystems, where human intelligence is required to bring in mainly two higher principles which AI fails to provide: the ability to prioritise and creativity allowing for new approaches not derived from given data. This paper additionally focuses on the aspect of in-situ coordination. This service is an aspect of organisation which is not separable and can therefore only be treated as self-determined subsystem, located outside of hierarchical control. At this point algorithms of AI need to be investigated not so much as to substitute human mind but to provide significant support.