The 2023 Bridge Academic Conference was held in Zhangjiagang, Jiangsu. Academician Zhou Xuhong (Academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, Director of the Steel Structure Engineering Research Center of Chongqing University) made a sharing entitled "Research Progress on Key Technologies of Intelligent Construction".
What is Smart Construction?
Regarding the definition of intelligent construction, Academician Zhou gave his own understanding: intelligent construction is a new generation of information technology and engineering construction technology, and the use of artificial intelligence technology in the project to complete complex construction work is a new type of production mode, the focus is artificial intelligence technology, the core is the integration of machine learning, intelligent computing technology and engineering technology. Intelligent construction covers functions such as intelligent design, intelligent production, intelligent construction, and intelligent operation and maintenance, and has been gradually applied to buildings, bridges, highways, tunnels, airports, stations, water conservancy, energy engineering and other fields. Intelligent construction is different from informatization, but also different from general automation, it emphasizes the replacement of people to do complex work, with human-computer interaction, independent learning, independent analysis, independent decision-making and independent optimization, judgment, early warning, decision-making and other advantages.
There is a very important point in this: that is. That is, the application of artificial intelligence is the support for decision-making, taking collision detection as an example, if it is not enough to only find the collision point, but also to combine industry knowledge and machine learning to put forward optimization suggestions, which is an important fulcrum of intelligent construction different from traditional informatization. In this way, we can gradually reduce the adverse impact of "people" in transaction decision-making (people will make mistakes, and the trend of intelligent development is to gradually replace the low-end thinking process of human beings), and improve the efficiency and accuracy of decision-making.
Why develop smart construction?
Similarly, why develop smart construction? We give our own understanding from two aspects:
The first is the inner need. The development of civil engineering and transportation has encountered bottlenecks in development: 1. The aging population has led to a shortage of young and strong labor in the industry. Young people are reluctant to work on construction sites, mainly because. 2. The quality requirements for building (structure) construction are improved. With the development of social economy, people's demand for material culture is not only limited to the stage of food and clothing, which puts forward higher requirements for our construction process and deliverables. The development of buildings in a more refined direction requires us to apply more sophisticated machines and more scientific organization to carry out our production and construction activities. 3. The situation of environmental protection is grim. The construction industry has always been a major energy consumer, and how to achieve energy conservation and emission reduction in the construction process under the general trend of energy conservation and low carbon is also a problem that the industry must think about. The development of intelligent construction can greatly reduce the wet operation on site, reduce the material loss of on-site processing, improve construction efficiency, and achieve the goal of energy saving and consumption reduction.
The second is extrinsic demand. With that, the extensive development model of the traditional construction industry also needs to be changed. Extensive production mode does not meet the requirements of high-quality development, green, high-quality is the core and ultimate goal of development, and industrialization is an important way of green development, therefore, China must take the road of new building industrialization, promote new industrialization, towards intelligent construction is an inevitable trend.
Key technology of intelligent construction - research on intelligent design of bridges
Bridge design faces many problems: there are many influencing factors of the bridge scheme, and the scheme needs to be adjusted repeatedly; 2. The structural system and cross-sectional form are flexibly selected, and the workload of modeling is large; 3. The artificial optimization of the structure is extremely inefficient and subjective. How to fix it? We decompose the intelligent design of bridges into two tasks: "intelligent modeling of structures" and "intelligent optimization of structures". These two works are interrelated and integrated, and the most important technical point is the two-way data transfer between the BIM model and the finite element model. How does this work? This is achieved through data mapping between them.
The key technology of intelligent construction - intelligent detection and pre-assembly of bridges
Why should large steel structure bridges be pre-assembled? Everyone should know that after the large steel structure is processed in the factory, it needs to be pre-assembled in the factory to prevent on-site rework caused by component errors (or errors). However, large bridges (or complex steel structure buildings) usually cannot be completely pre-assembled, and often pre-assembled in the form of unit modularity, even then they often need to occupy a large number of plant and land resources, raising the cost of project implementation. At the same time, because the whole process needs to be assembled from the project to the disassembly to the process of on-site installation, it also has a certain impact on the construction period of the entire project.
Then, pre-assembly based on BIM model can solve this problem well. To achieve pre-assembly on a computer, it is first necessary to accurately model the produced structural elements (digitization of the physical components), and here multi-scale point cloud scanning technology is used. Multi-scale point cloud scanning collects component data, and the overall size of the component is scanned by a terrestrial scanner, and the detail size of the bolt hole is scanned by a handheld scanner for local details. Models of different granularities are integrated into complete components through a unified coordinate system, which can then be assembled virtually on a computer. At the same time, we also need to fit and compare the design BIM model with the scanned point cloud model to achieve the integration of design, manufacturing and construction.
The key technology of intelligent construction - intelligent detection of construction quality and safety
Construction quality and safety involve a lot of aspects, from formwork engineering, steel engineering, concrete engineering, masonry engineering, etc., involving personnel safety protection, temporary electricity safety, edge safety protection, mechanical equipment safety protection, etc., and the site cross-type process is many, personnel intensive, and there are many unsafe factors. At present, the main detection methods are often achieved by manual means, which leads to problems such as low detection efficiency, poor timeliness and inability to achieve complete coverage. Based on this, the team adopted the integration of "intelligent collection of detection targets" and "intelligent detection", automatically collected on-site data through the implementation of multi-source heterogeneous data, and then completed the work of "intelligent quality detection" and "intelligent safety detection" through intelligent analysis.
The key technology of intelligent construction - intelligent construction robot
Robots are an important tool for human production and life and a powerful assistant to cope with the aging of the population, and it is also an important carrier of emerging technologies and a key equipment for modern industries. In manufacturing and construction, we: The technical route adopted by the team is in the form of a combination of three hardware modules (i.e., chassis selection, robotic arm selection, and actuator development) and three software modules (i.e., composition and positioning, path planning and autonomous obstacle avoidance, modeling and control).
The development of intelligent construction is the key to breaking through the bottleneck of development, enhancing core competitiveness and achieving high-quality development in the current construction industry. Second, the development of intelligent construction must be multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary, so as to jointly undertake this multidisciplinary research work.
Source: Official media/online news