An agent-based framework for supply chain coordination in construction

Supply chain coordination has become a critical success factor for supply chain management (SCM) and effectively improving the performance of organizations in various industries. Coordination refers to the integration of different parts of an organization or different organizations in supply chain to accomplish a collective set of tasks and to achieve mutual benefits. This paper defines the concepts of construction supply chain (CSC) and construction supply chain management, especially regards construction supply chain management as the coordination of interorganizations decision making in construction supply chain and the integration of key construction business processes and key members involved in construction supply chain. Much research and practice indicate that there still are many problems in construction, most of which are supply chain problems. The research analyzes the problems in construction supply chain. In order to resolve these problems and improving the performance of construction, an agent-based framework for construction supply chain coordination is designed based on the agent technology and multiattribute negotiation and multiattribute utility theory (MAUT). The framework, which integrates the construction organizations in construction supply chain and multiattribute negotiation model into a multiagent system (MAS), provides a solution for supply chain coordination in construction through multiattribute negotiation mechanism on the Internet. Finally, the prototype of the framework is developed and tentatively run based on an imaginary construction project. The trial run reveals the feasibility to implement the agent-based framework for coordination in construction.     

An integrated emotional and physiological assessment for VR-based active shooter incident experiments

Unfortunately, active shooter incidents are on the rise in the United States. With the recent technological advancements, virtual reality (VR) experiments could serve as an effective method to prepare civilians and law enforcement personnel for such scenarios. However, for VR experiments to be effective for active shooter training and research, such experiments must be able to evoke emotional and physiological responses as live active shooter drills and events do. The objective of this study is thus to test the effectiveness of an active shooter VR experiment on emotional and physiological responses. Additionally, we consider different locomotion techniques (i.e., walk-in-place and controller) and explore their impact on users’ sense of presence. The results suggest that the VR active shooter experiment in this study can induce emotional arousal and increase heart rate of the participants immersed in the virtual environment. Furthermore, compared to the controller, the walk-in-place technique resulted in a higher emotional arousal in terms of negative emotions and a stronger sense of presence. The study presents a foundation for future active shooter experiments as it supports the ecological validity using VR for active shooter incident related work for the purposes of training or research.     

A novel deep learning prediction model for concrete dam displacements using interpretable mixed attention mechanism

Dam displacements can effectively reflect its operational status, and thus establishing a reliable displacement prediction model is important for dam health monitoring. The majority of the existing data-driven models, however, focus on static regression relationships, which cannot capture the long-term temporal dependencies and adaptively select the most relevant influencing factors to perform predictions. Moreover, the emerging modeling tools such as machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) are mostly black-box models, which makes their physical interpretation challenging and greatly limits their practical engineering applications. To address these issues, this paper proposes an interpretable mixed attention mechanism long short-term memory (MAM-LSTM) model based on an encoder-decoder architecture, which is formulated in two stages. In the encoder stage, a factor attention mechanism is developed to adaptively select the highly influential factors at each time step by referring to the previous hidden state. In the decoder stage, a temporal attention mechanism is introduced to properly extract the key time segments by identifying the relevant hidden states across all the time steps. For interpretation purpose, our emphasis is placed on the quantification and visualization of factor and temporal attention weights. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed model is verified using monitoring data collected from a real-world dam, where its accuracy is compared to a classical statistical model, conventional ML models, and homogeneous DL models. The comparison demonstrates that the MAM-LSTM model outperforms the other models in most cases. Furthermore, the interpretation of global attention weights confirms the physical rationality of our attention-based model. This work addresses the research gap in interpretable artificial intelligence for dam displacement prediction and delivers a model with both high-accuracy and interpretability.     

Computer vision techniques for construction safety and health monitoring

For construction safety and health, continuous monitoring of unsafe conditions and action is essential in order to eliminate potential hazards in a timely manner. As a robust and automated means of field observation, computer vision techniques have been applied for the extraction of safety related information from site images and videos, and regarded as effective solutions complementary to current time-consuming and unreliable manual observational practices. Although some research efforts have been directed toward computer vision-based safety and health monitoring, its application in real practice remains premature due to a number of technical issues and research challenges in terms of reliability, accuracy, and applicability. This paper thus reviews previous attempts in construction applications from both technical and practical perspectives in order to understand the current status of computer vision techniques, which in turn suggests the direction of future research in the field of computer vision-based safety and health monitoring. Specifically, this paper categorizes previous studies into three groups—object detection, object tracking, and action recognition—based on types of information required to evaluate unsafe conditions and acts. The results demonstrate that major research challenges include comprehensive scene understanding, varying tracking accuracy by camera position, and action recognition of multiple equipment and workers. In addition, we identified several practical issues including a lack of task-specific and quantifiable metrics to evaluate the extracted information in safety context, technical obstacles due to dynamic conditions at construction sites and privacy issues. These challenges indicate a need for further research in these areas. Accordingly, this paper provides researchers insights into advancing knowledge and techniques for computer vision-based safety and health monitoring, and offers fresh opportunities and considerations to practitioners in understanding and adopting the techniques.     

Excavator 3D pose estimation using deep learning and hybrid datasets

Earthwork operations are crucial parts of most construction projects. Heavy construction equipment and workers are often required to work in limited workspaces simultaneously. Struck-by accidents resulting from poor worker and equipment interactions account for a large proportion of accidents and fatalities on construction sites. The emerging technologies based on computer vision and artificial intelligence offer an opportunity to enhance construction safety through advanced monitoring utilizing site cameras. A crucial pre-requisite to the development of safety monitoring applications is the ability to identify accurately and localize the position of the equipment and its critical components in 3D space. This study proposes a workflow for excavator 3D pose estimation based on deep learning using RGB images. In the proposed workflow, an articulated 3D digital twin of an excavator is used to generate the necessary data for training a 3D pose estimation model. In addition, a method for generating hybrid datasets (simulation and laboratory) for adapting the 3D pose estimation model for various scenarios with different camera parameters is proposed. Evaluations prove the capability of the workflow in estimating the 3D pose of excavators. The study concludes by discussing the limitations and future research opportunities.     

Spatial-temporal analysis of safety risks in trajectories of construction workers based on complex network theory

Understanding the traffic patterns of construction workers on high-risk construction sites is important for implementing behaviour-based safety management. However, safety risks in worker trajectories are a complex system with high uncertainty. This resulted in few studies focusing on analysing the spatial–temporal risk in workers' trajectories from a systematic perspective. This study designs a new framework to explore the spatial–temporal patterns of safety risks in the trajectories of construction workers based on complex network theory. First, an integrated site safety risk classification method by combining hazard sources and group trajectory distribution is developed to accurately describe the spatial distribution of site risks. Second, a new complex network chronnet is used to construct complex networks containing risk information for spatial–temporal analysis. Finally, key risk areas and risk transition patterns are identified through the analysis of network measures. The study also developed a computational program that allows the network to be constructed and analysed in real-time. The feasibility and effectiveness of the method are verified through a case study. The results show that the method can reveal the risk distribution at the micro level, and explore the risk clustering and transition features in worker trajectories at the macro level. The study allows for an accurate analysis of dynamic risk patterns in construction workers' trajectories from a systematic perspective. It can also provide theoretical and practical support for personalized and adaptive behaviour-based safety management for construction workers.     

Physics-informed few-shot learning for wind pressure prediction of low-rise buildings

This research proposes a physics-informed few-shot learning model to predict the wind pressures on full-scale specimens based on scaled wind tunnel experiments. Existing machine learning approaches in the wind engineering domain are incapable of accurately extrapolating the prediction from scaled data to full-scale data. The model presented in this research, on the other hand, is capable of extrapolating prediction from large-scale or small-scale models to full-scale measurements. The proposed ML model combines a few-shot learning model with the existing physical knowledges in the design standards related to the zonal information. This physical information helps in clustering the few-shot learning model and improves prediction performance. Using the proposed techniques, the scaling issue observed in wind tunnel tests can be partially resolved. A low mean-squared error, mean absolute error, and a high coefficient of determination were observed when predicting the mean and standard deviation wind pressure coefficients of the full-scale dataset. In addition, the benefit of incorporating physical knowledge is verified by comparing the results with a baseline few-shot learning model. This method is the first of its type as it is the first time to extrapolate in wind performance prediction by combining prior physical knowledge with a few-shot learning model in the field of wind engineering. With the benefit of the few-shot learning model, only a low-resolution of the measuring tap configuration is required, and the reliance on physical wind tunnel experiments can be reduced. The physics-informed few-shot learning model is an efficient, robust, and accurate alternate solution to predicting wind pressures on full-scale structures based on various modeled scale experiments.     

Parallel hyper heuristic algorithm based on reinforcement learning for the corridor allocation problem and parallel row ordering problem

Hyper heuristics is a relatively new optimisation algorithm. Numerous studies have reported that hyper heuristics are well applied in combinatorial optimisation problems. As a classic combinatorial optimisation problem, the row layout problem has not been publicly reported on applying hyper heuristics to its various sub-problems. To fill this gap, this study proposes a parallel hyper-heuristic approach based on reinforcement learning for corridor allocation problems and parallel row ordering problems. For the proposed algorithm, an outer layer parallel computing framework was constructed based on the encoding of the problem. The simulated annealing, tabu search, and variable neighbourhood algorithms were used in the algorithm as low-level heuristic operations, and Q-learning in reinforcement learning was used as a high-level strategy. A state space containing sequences and fitness values was designed. The algorithm performance was then evaluated for benchmark instances of the corridor allocation problem (37 groups) and parallel row ordering problem (80 groups). The results showed that, in most cases, the proposed algorithm provided a better solution than the best-known solutions in the literature. Finally, the meta-heuristic algorithm applied to three low-level heuristic operations is taken as three independent algorithms and compared with the proposed hyper-heuristic algorithm on four groups of parallel row ordering problem instances. The effectiveness of Q-learning in selection is illustrated by analysing the comparison results of the four algorithms and the number of calls of the three low-level heuristic operations in the proposed method.