FLEXIBLE DESIGN REPRESENTATION FOR CONSTRUCTION

A high percentage of overall defects in the built environment occurs during the construction period. Some of these relate to design and the others relate to construction. The detection and reasoning of defects requires involvement of multiple expertise. Researchers in the School of Architecture, the Robotics Institute, and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University are investing ways to integrate suites of emerging evaluation technologies to help find, record, manage, and limit the impact of construction defects. As part of this effort, the researchers have conducted case studies on construction sites near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Each case study serves as a test-bed to measure the feasibility of our approach and to discover problems. In this paper, we discuss the overall project work flow in which we emphasize the importance of a flexible representation for construction, and describe our solution using a concept of representational flexibility named sorts.