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Capturing and storing professional knowledge for use in BIM
The usage and application of building information modelling (BIM) just became that bit more interesting with the reported use of a Hawaiian contractor using AI to ‘capture’ the knowledge base of retiring professionals.
“Experienced estimators could look through a project’s plans and tell you in a few hours the rough cost and duration of a project,” says Hawaiian Dredging Construction Company (HDCC) BIM manager Chris Baze. “But doing that in their head, based on experience, means that it [their thinking process] is not documented. And if they retire, all the knowledge goes out of the door with them.”
The learning curve associated with scheduling construction projects means that knowledge lost by someone retiring is not easily replaceable by new recruits.
“You probably have to build about 10 high rise buildings before you can really say that you know what’s going on and how all the pieces work together,” Baze points out.
For this reason, HDCC looked into ways to capture and store that knowledge. The firm found that it could achieve that using Alice, a platform developed by United States-based technology provider Alice Technologies.
Alice uses artificial intelligence to create thousands of project schedule options and generate “what if” analyses. Contractors can use these to test variations in the way they can construct a building or piece of infrastructure.
HDCC used the platform to schedule the construction of two high rise residential developments in Honolulu, Hawaii, exploring the “what if” scenarios generated.
The way it is using Alice to digitise the scheduling knowledge of its experienced employees is through the creation of what Alice Technologies calls “recipes”.
When BIM models are imported into the platform, users can select a specific core project element – for example concrete column construction – to create a dedicated ‘recipe’. The recipes define all of the different tasks required to build that element and can add information about the materials, equipment and labour needed for each task. Tasks are presented in a network diagram illustrating the sequence to be followed.
HDCC hosts sessions where its experienced team members contribute to the creation of the recipes. The objective is to distill experience into repeatable formulae.
“We’re able to take all of the lessons learned, rules of thumb and actual operations knowledge and document them in the form of a recipe.”
The input from these sessions is then added directly to Alice.
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Contractors use the same or similar methods of constructing core elements in different projects, which means that schedulers will not have to start a new template from scratch every time.
“When we build two towers, the layout and the overall sequence might be drastically different. But the way that we pour and place formwork and build individual columns or walls is pretty consistent from project to project,” says Baze.
Alice users are able to change the parameters (parametric design) of a recipe to match the requirements of a specific job.
Baze concludes: “How do you take someone who’s been in the industry for two or even 10 years and have them understand things adequately? The only way that you can do that is if you start to digitise knowledge. I think that’s something that our industry in general is not very good at.”
