AECCafe Industry Predictions for 2023 – Datumate

By Jad Jarroush, Founder and CTO, Datumate

Towards a full AI & ML cloud-based platform for construction data analytics in infrastructure construction projects

Dr. Jad Jarroush

The current status of the construction industry

It’s 2023 and even though there has been some major progress in this arena, the construction industry is still plagued with major complexities. These include labor shortages, changing timelines, multiple teams and plans, delays, cost overruns, uncertain project planning and management, lack of professional experts and engineers and more. With the adoption of digital tools and automation, contractors and project owners are slowly finding ways to overcome these challenges. But as promising as these new technologies are, will they make as big an impact as expected on engineering and construction and what’s standing in the way of their adoption?

The challenges of adoption and implementation

There are multiple challenges on the way to adopting and successfully implementing digital construction tools. The first is the basic need to break the habit of using manual methods such as pen and paper and the initial daily disruptive impact that comes with changing existing business processes. This is often exacerbated by the lack of communication around these processes and their long-term benefits, as well as a lack of confidence in the accuracy of the data. Organization complexity also plays a role in making adoption and implementation challenging and often fragmented, and this can also lead to ownership issues. Another factor that often affects adoption is the lack of skill challenges required for new technologies, especially as the average age of professionals is increasing all the time. Finally, and probably the most obvious of these challenges, is a lack of budget for digital adoption.

Digital technologies and tools for construction

When deployed intelligently, digital technologies have the potential to revolutionize the construction industry.

Solutions already used to improve project planning and management include building information modelling (BIM), digital twins, virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR), 3D imaging, digitalized project management workflows, drones, light detection and ranging (Lidar technology), and robotics.

In practice, this means that precise data collected from sources such as drones, lasers, sensors and more, can be integrated with 3D computer software to compare designs, current as-built and site conditions as well as virtual models. This enables stakeholders across the value chain to detect even the smallest of errors before they turn into bigger problems – avoiding downtime, decreasing rework, and preventing delays.

Deeper dive into digital construction analytics for construction

In order to understand the full impact of automatic digital construction technologies on the construction industry, let’s take a look at the DatuBIM platform by Datumate.

DatuBIM is an automated software-as-a-service (SaaS) cloud platform designed and built for infrastructure construction projects. It enables construction companies to monitor project progress, ensure quality, and control budgets based on actionable project execution metrics extracted from field data.

By providing a single source of up-to-date data through the entire lifecycle of the asset built, DatuBIM empowers stakeholders to efficiently manage construction sites from planning through execution and maintenance.

How can this and other platforms help solve adoption challenges?

Graphical User Interface (GUI) and simplicity of usage

One of the significant challenges of a SAAS platform when it is designed to serve all the stakeholders of the project engineering & manager team is the graphical user interface and the simplicity of the usage.

Figure #1: the main user interface of the DatuBIM automatic data analytics platform

In construction, the average user age is usually higher than in other domains due to the fact that there is a need for a high level of experience and expertise, as well as the global shortage of civil engineers.

The DatuBIM GUI is designed with this in mind and is easy to use. It enables users to intuitively save the history of the as-built of the project on the time axis. Users can also easily add the project design data files on the top of the as-built, importing the Gantt schedule from Microsoft Project or from Primavera, and connect between the schedule activities and the design data. Then, using an automatic tools report engine, users can easily define the engineering reports to be generated immediately after drone images are uploaded to the platform. The reports provide project managers with the accurate data they need to easily detect construction issues and make more data-driven professional decisions. For example:

• Detecting geometrical activities that missed their schedule date (Figure #2 illustrates such a report general preview)

Figure #2: illustrates the Gantt activities in traffic lights colors, where the green activities are meeting their schedule and red activities dismissed it. Orange color present suspicious activities.

• Calculating material volumes and comparing them to the plans
• Quality assurance for each geometrical design construction objects such as bridges, roads and rails structures, catenary poles, walls, drainage pipelines, and electricity
• Detecting safety issues
• Detecting material theft
• Detecting budget issues vs. design and plans
• Automatic As-Built as a CAD topo maps for automatic deliveries
• Cash flow charts for projects
• Action item and mission reporting to all stakeholders based on AI engine

Toward a more automatic monitoring and decision-making construction reality

Platforms such as DatuBIM are slowly being adopted by more and more stakeholders in the construction industry as they realize the significant advantages of automating and digitizing parts of the project lifecycle. In the future, these platforms will probably be fully integrated with automatic drone flight mapping solutions such as Airobotics, which can be designed to fly drones automatically according to AI-based algorithms based on the last photos taken in the digital construction platform.

These images can then be uploaded automatically into the SaaS platform, the platform’s automatic photogrammetric high-accuracy engine will produce the digital terrain model (DTM) of the site, and based on a smart AI engine, will generate all of functionality mentioned above without the need for manual human intervention.

The result – an AI-based platform will be able to automatically measure all of the geometric works, compare it to the design plans, automatically populate dashboard parameters and send action items and status reports to all stakeholders across the construction lifecycle.

In addition to these predicted improvements to drone auto mapping, automatic mobile scanning mapping technology will also improve and will become both more cost-effective and accurate. This will enable the installation of such technology on almost every machine in a project site. Once this becomes more widely available, all laser scanning can be fed into the platform in real-time to solve the need for higher accuracy and underground mapping.

What does the future hold for digital construction management methodology?

The scenarios described above, whereby a fully automatic platform will be used to help make decisions about how, when and where to use mapping technology and then provide actionable insights and reports to construction teams is not a fictitious reality, but rather a feasible one that will become a reality in less than 15 years from now. So, the question still remains – how will this impact infrastructure construction in the short-, mid- and long-term?

In the short and the mid-term, this type of automatic digital monitoring construction platform based on BIM and digital-twin will positively affect transparency and collaboration, especially if all stakeholders (owners, contractors and sub-contractors) are using the same platform as a single source of truth. This will accelerate the move towards lean construction models and new project management models such as integrated project delivery (IPD). These models call for full collaboration and transparency amongst all project stakeholders and in order to make this vision a reality, a single source of truth is required. The ability to share crucial information with other stakeholders can significantly minimize the potential for mistakes and pave the way for better data-driven decision making. In this way, the supply chain can start operating as one whole everyone involved in a project is on the same page – creating a win-win situation for all.

It’s important to note that the main goal of automation and digital construction tools is not to replace humans, but rather to help resolve the challenge professional resource shortages and enable the same number of people to do more than what they are doing today without the need for advanced skills but with increased accuracy.

In the long-term, with improvements in the robot and the automatic machinery control technology industry, this domain of infrastructure construction will move closer to un-human automatic lean production, very similar to the cars industry production, but even in these scenarios, humans will still be needed to supervise projects.

About Author

Dr. Jad Jarroush is the  Founder of Datumate.

Category: Industry Predictions

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 17th, 2023 at 12:20 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.