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Effective upkeep of aging infrastructure systems with limited funding and resources calls for efficient bridge management systems. Although data-driven models have been extensively studied in the last decade for extracting knowledge from past experience to guide future maintenance decision making, their performance and usefulness have been limited by the level of detail and accuracy of currently available bridge condition databases. This paper leverages an untapped resource for bridge condition data and proposes a new method to extract condition information from it at a high level of detail. To that end, a natural language processing approach was developed to formalize structural condition knowledge by formulating a sequence labeling task and modeling inspection narratives as a combination of words representing defects, their severity and location, while accounting for the context of each word. The proposed framework employs a deep-learning-based approach and incorporates context-aware components including a bi-directional Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) neural network architecture and a Conditional Random Field (CRF) classifier to account for the context of words when assigning labels. A dependency-based word embedding model was also used to represent the raw text while incorporating both semantic and contextual information. The sequence labeling model was trained using bridge inspection reports collected from the Virginia Department of Transportation bridge inspection database and achieved an F1 score of 94.12% during testing. The proposed model also demonstrated improvements compared with baseline sequence labeling models, and was further used to demonstrate the capability of detecting condition changes with respect to previous inspection records. Results of this study show that the proposed method can be used to extract and create a condition information database that can further assist in developing data-driven bridge management and condition forecasting models, as well as automated bridge inspection systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nation's massive underground utility infrastructure must comply with a multitude of regulations. The regulatory compliance checking of underground utilities requires an objective and consistent interpretation of the regulations. However, utility regulations contain a variety of domain-specific terms and numerous spatial constraints regarding the location and clearance of underground utilities. It is challenging for the interpreters to understand both the domain and spatial semantics in utility regulations. To address the challenge, this paper adopts an ontology and rule-based Natural Language Processing (NLP) framework to automate the interpretation of utility regulations – the extraction of regulatory information and the subsequent transformation into logic clauses. Two new ontologies have been developed. The urban product ontology (UPO) is domain-specific to model domain concepts and capture domain semantics on top of heterogeneous terminologies in utility regulations. The spatial ontology (SO) consists of two layers of semantics – linguistic spatial expressions and formal spatial relations – for better understanding the spatial language in utility regulations. Pattern-matching rules defined on syntactic features (captured using common NLP techniques) and semantic features (captured using ontologies) were encoded for information extraction. The extracted information elements were then mapped to their semantic correspondences via ontologies and finally transformed into deontic logic (DL) clauses to achieve the semantic and logical formalization. The approach was tested on the spatial configuration-related requirements in utility accommodation policies. Results show it achieves a 98.2% precision and a 94.7% recall in information extraction, a 94.4% precision and a 90.1% recall in semantic formalization, and an 83% accuracy in logical formalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A method to learn planning & scheduling knowledge as Dynamic Process Templates (DPT). • A sequential machine learning learns planning and scheduling knowledge for the DPTs. • For an input sequence of activities, DPTs generate predecessor & successor activities. • The DPTs predict previously seen & unseen activity dependencies at 98% & 72% accuracy. Today, construction planning and scheduling is almost always performed manually, by experienced practitioners. The knowledge of those individuals is materialized, maintained, and propagated through master schedules and look-ahead plans. While historical project schedules are available, manually mining their embedded knowledge to create generic work templates for future projects or revising look-ahead schedules is very difficult, time-consuming and error-prone. The rigid work templates from prior research are also not scalable to cover the inter and intra-class variability in historical schedule activities. This paper aims at fulfilling these needs via a new method to automatically learn construction knowledge from historical project planning and scheduling records and digitize such knowledge in a flexible and generalizable data schema. Specifically, we present Dynamic Process Templates (DPTs) based on a novel vector representation for construction activities where the sequencing knowledge is modeled with generative Long Short-Term Memory Recurrent Neural Networks (LSTM-RNNs). Our machine learning models are exhaustively tested and validated on a diverse dataset of 32 schedules obtained from real-world projects. The experimental results show our method is capable of learning planning and sequencing knowledge at high accuracy across different projects. The benefits for automated project planning and scheduling, schedule quality control, and automated generation of project look-aheads are discussed in detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Construction procedural constraints are critical in facilitating effective construction procedure checking in practice and for various inspection systems. Nowadays, the manual extraction of construction procedural constraints is costly and time-consuming. The automatic extraction of construction procedural constraint knowledge (e.g., knowledge entities and interlinks/relationships between them) from regulatory documents is a key challenge. Traditionally, natural language processing is implemented using either rule-based or machine learning approaches. Limited efforts on rule-based extraction of construction regulations often rely on pre-defined vocabularies and involve heavy feature engineering. Based on characteristics of the knowledge expression of construction procedural constraints in Chinese regulations, this paper explores a hybrid deep neural network, combining the bidirectional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) and the conditional random field (CRF), for the automatic extraction of the qualitative construction procedural constraints. Based on the proposed deep neural network, the recognition and extraction of named entities and relations between them are realized. Unlike existing information extraction research efforts using rule-based methods, the proposed hybrid deep learning approach can be applied without complex handcrafted features engineering. Besides, the long distance dependency relationships between different entities in regulations are considered. The model implementation results demonstrate the good performance of the end-to-end deep neural network in the extraction of construction procedural constraints. This study can be considered as one of the early explorations of knowledge extraction from construction regulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]