The Digital Innovation of Smart Construction Site

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THE DIGITAL INNOVATION OF SMART CONSTRUCTION SITE FROM AI LAB x ALIBABA CLOUD DESIGN

" IF THERE IS A CITY'S SHAPE IN THE BUILDING, AND THERE IS A FUTURE OF THE CITY IN THE CONSTRUCTION SITE. "

With decades of rapid development, China has become a large construction site itself. However, the extensive development mode in the past has also brought many problems: safety, accidents, construction quality problems, lack of real-time information and many more. The digitization of construction site is an important part of industrial digital transformation. Alibaba Cloud smart construction site AI service platform is a digital product improving construction quality for enterprises. Combined with computer vision technology, it conducts real-time analysis and offers instant warning from computer vision, provides smart measurement and progress identification for construction quality and management.

THE 3D VISUALIZATIONS ARE RUN-TIME BASED RENDERINGS, AND BUILT ON TOP OF ALIBABA CLOUD DESIGN WEBGL LIBRARY - GDS.

GDS is short for General Design Studies, which means the core: Generative Design. It is developed on top of WebGL technology, and a JavaScript library by Alibaba Cloud Design. It can be highly reused and iterated in real-time computing effects. It is designed by algorithm thinking, focuses on solving the problem of graphics technology and visual effect of renderings. GDS powers parametric configurations, and has a shader chunk of many advanced visual effects, as well as a group of style components. With the capabilities of GDS, we took 3 steps to undertake to digital design of the smart construction site.

①

FROM INTELLIGENT BIM MODEL

( Building Information Modeling )

TO HIGH PERFORMANCE glTF MODEL

Traditional building model production relies heavily on manual modeling. High cost and difficult to scale. Building Information Modeling (BIM) analyzes AutoCAD files through AI and computer algorithms, and it automatically generates 1:1 hi-res 3D building models, which provides more machine-generated model sources for digital products. At the same time, because the smart construction site is essentially a SaaS product running in the browser, the 3D visualization requires all real-time rendering realized by WebGL. Real-time rendering means that the graphics presented on the screen are constantly calculated by code. Performing at 60 FPS represents high performance. In the real-time rendering, unnecessary polygons of the model may affect the performance. Therefore we leverage Blender software to take the BIM model further, ultimately we manage to optimize over 95% polygons off to achieve excellent WebGL-friendly glTF models.

~ 9,2444

VERTICES RENDERED AT 60FPS OVER THE SCENE: THE HIGH-PERFORMANCE REAL-TIME COMPUTATION

②

THE AUTOMATIC CODE GENERATION OF 3D GEOGRAPHIC SCENE

To build a more realistic 3D scene, only the main construction BIM model is not enough. It is also necessary to design the city scene around the buildings to make the space more realistic visually. Through GDS, the surrounding geographical scenes are directly generated by the code. In short, the 3D architecture of the whole city is no longer dependent on manual modeling and UV mapping. Our home-made graphic technology - GDS magnificently improves the productivity.

③

REAL-TIME RENDERING VFX & PARAMETRIC STYLES.

People are fond of cool visual effects, but cool visual effects always need expensive hardware support. In the smart construction site, based on the high performance of GDS for 3D scene, the advanced real-time effect can even run on generic computers.

In order to achieve better visual effects in the design of the product's visualization, all our materials are from GDS's shader chunks. Our in-house developed shader empowers a variety of visual features, such as HDRI refection, environment mapping, traffic flow simulation, depth based soft shadow, SSAO, Aurora and run-time progress indicator, to name a few.

TAKE A CLOSER LOOK, THE SMART CONSTRUCTION SITE, IS A SMART CITY IN ITS INFANCY.

In 2018, the market scale of China's smart construction site industry reached 9.91 billion CNY, a year-on-year increase of 24.03%; at the same time, more than 95% of the construction sites in China are still in the original state. According to rough estimations, the scale and capacity of the whole domestic smart construction site market can reach hundreds of billion CNY. In other words, there is a huge business opportunity ahead. Meanwhile, there are hundreds of millions of migrant workers in the construction industry. According to the bulletin of the State Council's Safety Commission Office, the total number of accidents in the construction industry has ranked first in industrial and mining business accidents for nine consecutive years, and the number of accidents and deaths have been "double increased" since 2016. To solve the problem of digital construction site is also to solve the problem of construction safety and quality.