Software agents and robots in construction:an outlook

摘要

Summary: The rapid growth of the World Wide Web (Web) has spawned some rather new technologies for handling the vast amount of information available there. Services like Yahoo, AltaVista and Virtual Software Library use web crawling robots and agents to gather the information. Construction information processes have many similarities to the Internet- both are fragmented, there are numerous information sources and the information is poorly structured. We have successfully applied similar technologies that have proven themselves on the Internet to handle construction information. Custom robots and an agent-enabled database have been developed and have been used in the on-going research projects. They have proven useful on the global construction scope of a construction virtual library, on a narrower national scope of regulation management and on the project level to manage documents. The paper identifies the problems, introduces the technologies, demonstrates how they were used in construction context and concludes that in a client-server environment such as the Internet or an intranet, agent technology is an important building block of CIC environments.