Building Intelligent Virtual Agents as Conversational Partners in Digital Construction Sites

Construction-related professionals are required to interact constantly on a variety of complex spatiotemporal occasions with several groups of people (e.g., architects, engineers, other construction professionals). The efficiency and effectiveness of the construction process strongly depends on the successful communication of information between all the functional groups involved in the different contexts of construction projects. However, lack of exposure to construction processes and construction professionals is widely observed in construction graduates. This lack of exposure results in deficient understanding of construction domain concepts in relation to real world problems. The use of intelligent virtual agents powered by building information modeling (BIM)-based virtual environments provides opportunities to incorporate conversational practices into classroom teaching. By employing these virtual interactions, a consequence-free environment that is controllable, representative, and repeatable can be achieved, with the benefit of providing constant real-time feedback to students. In such digital settings, students can observe spatiotemporal dependent occasions and communicate with other virtual professionals to obtain a better understanding of the construction events. In this paper, the technical workflow to create this virtual communication platform will be described in detail. This workflow includes (1) procedure of generating and authoring a virtual agent with its corresponding layers of information, (2) the creation process of the virtual environment that corresponds the conversational contexts using BIM-based technologies, and (3) the integration of the intelligent virtual agent and the digital site into a working platform. A case study is used to illustrate the conversational practice platform workflow for a high-risk caught-in or -between hazard scenario.