China's first domestic integrated platform for steel structure industrial plant intelligent construction (also dubbed in Chinese plant building machine), was put into use in Zhoushan city, Zhejiang province, in September 2022. (COURTESY PHOTO)

By LIN Yuchen

China's state -level new area Xiong'an issued a document on March 1 that stipulates the gradual establishment of intelligent construction standards by 2025. It was then reported that hundreds of local industrial suppliers attended a conference under the theme Smart City and Future Community in the city.

Later on March 27, the Beijing Municipal Housing and Urban-Rural Development Commission announced a work plan to build up five leading intelligent construction enterprises, more than two intelligent construction industry bases, and more industrial clusters by the end of 2025, which will serve as foundations for digital transformation among architecture enterprises.

Despite the recent tide of debates in AI-enabled transformation, "China Construction" is making every effort to get on track with AI.

Intelligent boon

A project undertaken by China Construction Fourth Engineering Division Corporation (CCFEDC) is exemplifying domestic AI-empowered construction.

"The whole construction process is monitored through a cloud platform," said Xu Chun, spokesperson for CCFEDC. He explained that the application of a robotic vision module and Edge-AI computing server allows safety inspection robots to alert untypical temperatures and hazardous gases in the engineering environment.

The project is also rendered more effective through AI. It applied Building Information Modeling (BIM) for integrated control of design, procurement, construction, metering and pricing. According to Meng Jianmin, academician at the Chinese Academy of Engineering, the project's AI-enabled generation of three-dimensional design based on BIM realized more precise budgeting, shorter construction periods, as well as improved quality of buildings.

Last September, China's first domestic integrated platform for steel structure industrial plant intelligent construction (also dubbed in Chinese plant building machine), was put into use in Zhoushan city, Zhejiang province. It serves as a large operation platform within a plant that can incorporate multiple types of construction robots. They may combine to provide diversified industrialized solutions to steel structure plant construction.

According to the equipment's chief designer Liao Feng, compared with traditional methods of construction, it can reduce the risk of personnel working at heights, and significantly shorten the construction period; it also improves manual work efficiency by more than 20 percent. 

There are many other cases that have upgraded construction using AI in China.

Intelligent rebar-tying robots that replaced manual work in the construction site of JindiJuyuan Community in Shanghai, recorded three times higher efficiency than before.

In its pilot, an intelligent construction project dubbed "84-mu test field", property developer Country Garden introduced robotic construction and BIM. On the project's site, there have been various types of robots to help produce concrete, decorate rooms, and transport building materials.

China is also advanced in the application of AI vision, according to Yu Xiaohui, president of the China Academy of Information and Communication Technology.

The technology, which continuously, automatically processes and analyzes image or video data through deep learning methods, can be used in construction to perform real-time inspection and monitoring, especially in such tasks as structural component recognition, and unsafe behavior and status recognition, said Yu.

Policy implementations

In recent years, there have been an introduction of policy portfolios that facilitate intelligent construction within China.

In July 2020, a series of government agencies including the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, jointly released guidelines to promote the synergistic development of intelligent construction and new building industrialization.

In March 2021, "Development of intelligent construction” was added to the national "14th Five-Year Plan" outline. Later in January 2022, the national housing and urban-rural construction work conference took promotion of the collaborative development of intelligent construction and new building industrialization as one of the key tasks for the transformation and upgrading of the construction industry. The 14th Five-Year Plan for the Development of the Construction Industry also proposed to accelerate the synergistic development of intelligent construction and new building industrialization.

In November 2022, 24 cities including Beijing, Tianjin, Chongqing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Shenyang, Nanjing, and Hefei were selected as the pilot cities for intelligent construction, with a pilot period of three years. It is worth mentioning that this is also the first group of intelligent construction pilot cities in China.