Automated processing of construction specifications to support inspection and quality control

Construction specifications play an important role in communicating quality requirements on a construction project. However, working with these specifications can be cumbersome and error prone due to the large amount of specifications that need to be considered and the dependencies between those specifications. This paper discusses an approach for automating the processing of construction specifications to support inspection and quality control tasks in construction projects. The reasoning approach leverages information available in different types of product and process models to identify specifications applicable to products existing in a project and to extract the requirements imposed by the specifications applicable to each product. The automated identification of applicable specifications and the automated extraction of requirements imposed by these specifications can support and enable automation of tasks, such as inspection and defect detection, which depend on information from construction specifications. Thus, the herein presented specification reasoning approach can be seen as a stepping stone towards automated defect detection on construction sites. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.