The objective of this project is to bring powerful operations visualization capabilities within the reach, ability, and training of all construction practitioners, researchers, educators, and students. The project in-volves basic research, design of appropriate tools, and development of educational materials to enable accurate 3D animation of construction operations in immersive Virtual Reality (VR) and outdoor Aug-mented Reality (AR) environments. The research addresses fundamental limitations in knowledge, and includes the investigation of automated methods to describe dynamic evolving terrain, techniques to de-fine accurate resource motion paths, methods to portray accurate physical behavior of articulated re-sources, and approaches to animate fluid construction materials. The research also explores methods to accurately overlay (augment) graphical images of operations over real jobsites, techniques for intuitive and safe user-computer interaction in AR, and approaches to make operations animation in AR highly adaptable and mobile. The educational objectives are intricately related to and dependent on the research, and include the design of VR-based educational modules, workshops for educators and researchers, cur-riculum development and improvement, AR-based teaching material for K-12 students, strategies to re-cruit and retain the brightest women and minority engineers, and efforts to develop the PI's personal skills as a teacher and educator. This project aims to significantly improve the verification, validation, and communication of discrete-event simulation models, thus facilitating their use in operations planning and decision-making. Performance of field operations is also expected to improve by allowing proper com-munication of planned work prior to execution. In addition to communicating what may happen in the future (from simulation), it will be possible to re-create what happened in the past (from records), and what is currently happening (from real-time data).
This project aims to enable improved planning, analysis, and design of field construction operations. This can result in substantial cost and time savings, improvement in industry competitiveness, and reduction in life cycle costs of civil infrastructure and other constructed facilities. The cumulative impact across the $899 billion U.S. construction industry is expected to be significant. Such benefits also accrue in fields such as manufacturing, transportation, mining, and ship-building where operations visualization is as vital as in construction. The project is expected to significantly impact education by fostering innova-tion in curriculum at construction schools, and spawning an area of specialization in Construction Engi-neering and Management. The tools and educational materials resulting from the project are expected to enhance the construction curriculum, and are being made publicly available to educators at other institu-tions. The project's contributions to knowledge impact future research by allowing researchers to spend major efforts on studying and addressing operations, safety, and educational issues, and less effort on cre-ating animations. Several Graduate and Undergraduate students are also involved in the project. The PI has been proactively working to recruit and retain women and minority engineers in the project by work-ing with the Society of Women Engineers, the Minority Engineering Program Office, and the Under-graduate Research Office Program at the University of Michigan. In summary, the societal benefits of the project are: 1) the reductions in construction life-cycle costs that can be possible through proper planning and design of construction operations; 2) the effective education and training of future construction engi-neers; and 3) the career development of the personnel participating in the project.
