Pingbo Tang

Jinfeng Lou, Zijie Liang, Pengkun Liu et al.

Decision-making in urban infrastructure management during extreme events relies heavily on human operators, yet current computational support systems often fail to account for non-monotonic human adaptation and latent psychological biases like overconfidence and defensive overcorrection. This study addresses this gap by integrating Instance-Based Learning Theory (IBLT) into the domain of civil engineering computing. We establish a computational cognitive architecture that simulates operator decision processes through the mathematical mechanisms of memory retrieval and utility blending. This model functions as a computational baseline, representing boundedly rational adaptation driven by experiential priors, thus allowing for the algorithmic isolation of latent psychological biases from the baseline dynamics of memory-based learning. We demonstrated this framework using a human-in-the-loop microworld experiment simulating subway flood-induced track suspensions, where dispatchers must balance passenger safety against service efficiency. Analysis revealed a complex, non-linear human adaptation cycle consisting of four phases: acquisition, overconfidence, overcorrection, and recalibration. Specifically, the computational model exposed a significant divergence during the post-accident "overcorrection" phase: while human operators exhibited immediate, defensive risk overestimation, the model maintained a stable trajectory based on accumulated experience. This strategic divergence confirms that operational instability following failure is often attributable to acute psychological bias overriding stable memory-based adaptation, a pattern theoretically expected to recur across analogous high-stakes environments and validatable through multi-modal behavioral and sensor data from professional operators.

Ruoxin Xiong, Yanyu Wang, Jiannan Cai et al.

The Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry is undergoing rapid digital transformation, producing diverse digital assets such as datasets, computational models, use cases, and educational materials across the built environment lifecycle. However, these resources are often fragmented across repositories and inconsistently documented, limiting their discoverability, interpretability, and reuse in research, education, and practice. This study introduces OpenConstruction, a community-driven open-science ecosystem that aggregates, organizes, and contextualizes openly accessible AEC digital resources. The ecosystem is structured into four catalogs, including datasets, models, use cases, and educational resources, supported by consistent descriptors, curator-led validation, and transparent governance. As of December 2025, the platform hosts 94 datasets, 65 models, and a growing collection of use cases and educational materials. Two case studies demonstrate how the ecosystem supports benchmarking, curriculum development, and broader adoption of open-science practices in the AEC sector. The platform is publicly accessible at https://www.openconstruction.org/.

Ruoxin Xiong, Yanyu Wang, Jiannan Cai et al.

The construction industry increasingly relies on visual data to support Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) applications for site monitoring. High-quality, domain-specific datasets, comprising images, videos, and point clouds, capture site geometry and spatiotemporal dynamics, including the location and interaction of objects, workers, and materials. However, despite growing interest in leveraging visual datasets, existing resources vary widely in sizes, data modalities, annotation quality, and representativeness of real-world construction conditions. A systematic review to categorize their data characteristics and application contexts is still lacking, limiting the community's ability to fully understand the dataset landscape, identify critical gaps, and guide future directions toward more effective, reliable, and scalable AI applications in construction. To address this gap, this study conducts an extensive search of academic databases and open-data platforms, yielding 51 publicly available visual datasets that span the 2005-2024 period. These datasets are categorized using a structured data schema covering (i) data fundamentals (e.g., size and license), (ii) data modalities (e.g., RGB and point cloud), (iii) annotation frameworks (e.g., bounding boxes), and (iv) downstream application domains (e.g., progress tracking). This study synthesizes these findings into an open-source catalog, OpenConstruction, supporting data-driven method development. Furthermore, the study discusses several critical limitations in the existing construction dataset landscape and presents a roadmap for future data infrastructure anchored in the Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability (FAIR) principles. By reviewing the current landscape and outlining strategic priorities, this study supports the advancement of data-centric solutions in the construction sector.

Jiaqi Wen, Pingbo Tang, Shaolei Ren et al.

We study the operation of community water systems, where pumps and valves must be scheduled to reliably meet water demands while minimizing energy consumption. While existing optimization-based methods are effective under well-modeled environments, real-world community scenarios exhibit highly dynamic contexts-such as human activities, weather variations, etc-that significantly affect water demand patterns and operational targets across different zones. Traditional optimization approaches struggle to aggregate and adapt to such heterogeneous and rapidly evolving contextual information in real time. While Large Language Model (LLM) agents offer strong capabilities for understanding heterogeneous community context, they are not suitable for directly producing reliable real-time control actions. To address these challenges, we propose a bi-level AI-agent-based framework, WaterAdmin, which integrates LLM-based community context abstraction at the upper level with optimization-based operational control at the lower level. This design leverages the complementary strengths of both paradigms to enable adaptive and reliable operation. We implement WaterAdmin on the hydraulic simulation platform EPANET and demonstrate superior performance in maintaining pressure reliability and reducing energy consumption under highly dynamic community contexts.

Pengkun Liu, Shuna Ni, Stanislav I. Stoliarov et al.

Fire patterns, consisting of fire effects that offer insights into fire behavior and origin, are traditionally classified based on investigators' visual observations, leading to subjective interpretations. This study proposes a framework for quantitative fire pattern classification to support fire investigators, aiming for consistency and accuracy. The framework integrates four components. First, it leverages human-computer interaction to extract fire patterns from surfaces, combining investigator expertise with computational analysis. Second, it employs an aspect ratio-based random forest model to classify fire pattern shapes. Third, fire scene point cloud segmentation enables precise identification of fire-affected areas and the mapping of 2D fire patterns to 3D scenes. Lastly, spatial relationships between fire patterns and indoor elements support an interpretation of the fire scene. These components provide a method for fire pattern analysis that synthesizes qualitative and quantitative data. The framework's classification results achieve 93% precision on synthetic data and 83% on real fire patterns.

Sri Ramana Saketh Vasanthawada, Pengkun Liu, Pingbo Tang

Monitoring construction progress is crucial yet resource-intensive, prompting the exploration of computer-vision-based methodologies for enhanced efficiency and scalability. Traditional data acquisition methods, primarily focusing on indoor environments, falter in construction site's complex, cluttered, and dynamically changing conditions. This paper critically evaluates the application of two advanced 3D segmentation methods, Segment Anything Model (SAM) and Mask3D, in challenging outdoor and indoor conditions. Trained initially on indoor datasets, both models' adaptability and performance are assessed in real-world construction settings, highlighting the gap in current segmentation approaches due to the absence of benchmarks for outdoor scenarios. Through a comparative analysis, this study not only showcases the relative effectiveness of SAM and Mask3D but also addresses the critical need for tailored segmentation workflows capable of extracting actionable insights from construction site data, thereby advancing the field towards more automated and precise monitoring techniques.

Cheng Zhang, Jinwoo Kim, JungHo Jeon et al.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the opportunities and barriers of Integrated Human-Machine Intelligence (IHMI) in civil engineering. Integrating artificial intelligence's high efficiency and repeatability with humans' adaptability in various contexts can advance timely and reliable decision-making during civil engineering projects and emergencies. Successful cases in other domains, such as biomedical science, healthcare, and transportation, showed the potential of IHMI in data-driven, knowledge-based decision-making in numerous civil engineering applications. However, whether the industry and academia are ready to embrace the era of IHMI and maximize its benefit to the industry is still questionable due to several knowledge gaps. This paper thus calls for future studies in exploring the value, method, and challenges of applying IHMI in civil engineering. Our systematic review of the literature and motivating cases has identified four knowledge gaps in achieving effective IHMI in civil engineering. First, it is unknown what types of tasks in the civil engineering domain can be assisted by AI and to what extent. Second, the interface between human and AI in civil engineering-related tasks need more precise and formal definition. Third, the barriers that impede collecting detailed behavioral data from humans and contextual environments deserve systematic classification and prototyping. Lastly, it is unknown what expected and unexpected impacts will IHMI have on the AEC industry and entrepreneurship. Analyzing these knowledge gaps led to a list of identified research questions. This paper will lay the foundation for identifying relevant studies to form a research roadmap to address the four knowledge gaps identified.