Intelligent Planning of Construction Projects

Abstract

Knowledge representation and reasoning techniques derived from artificial intelligence (AI) research permit computers to generate plans, not merely analyze plans produced by humans. They explicitly represent knowledge about how to generate plans in the form of initial and goal states, descriptions of actions along with their preconditions and effects, and a control structure for selecting new actions to insert into a project plan. From the more than two dozen AI planners developed and published since the 1960s, we have chosen the system for interactive planning and execution (SIPE) to investigate the utility of AI planners for construction project planning. This paper presents our experience modeling a multistory office building project for construction planning, implementing SIPE to plan this project, and describing SIPE's performance in planning the construction of large‐scale multistory buildings. With the use of a frame hierarchy, generic operators, and a constraint‐based approach, SIPE can generate logically correct activity networks for multistory building construction from a description of the components of a facility. To model such construction projects in a concise and uniform framework, we show the usefulness of some underlying principles for establishing ordering relationships among the project components involved in construction activities.