Automated planning support for on-site construction inspection

Construction inspectors need inspection planning assistance to specify goals for inspection and to develop and search among feasible inspection plans that inspectors can implement to address these inspection goals on construction sites. This paper presents the details of an automated planning approach to support on-site construction inspections and thereby permit inspectors to both generate complete, detailed inspection plans and to consider numerous possible alternatives in detail. The approach consists of representations and reasoning mechanisms to develop inspection goals and plans, and to support consideration of multiple possible inspection plans. In particular, the approach consists of a series of matching processes, facilitated by faceted classification reasoning, and a generative method-based approach to inspection planning that features a measurement distribution concept to permit various approaches for distributing measurements throughout components. The authors present an object-oriented prototype to illustrate and demonstrate this approach, together with detailed validation discussions that utilize inspection scenarios documented in construction inspection literature to demonstrate the generality and applicability of the developed approach. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.