An intelligent construction system based on digital twin and foundation model optimization

Construction sites routinely face multi-trade concurrency, spatiotemporal coupling, and high safety risk; relying solely on manual inspection and heuristic scheduling often leads to lagging detection and inconsistent execution. In response, recent practice has introduced digital twins (DT) to fuse video, sensors, and BIM and thus improve site visibility; however, most implementations remain at monitoring/visualization, lacking a mechanism to convert cognition into executable, verifiable decisions. Meanwhile, Transformer foundation models show strong capabilities in multimodal perception and representation learning, yet they are rarely closed-looped with engineering constraints and on-site execution. Against this backdrop, taking high-rise self-climbing platform (SCP) operations as a representative scenario, we build a DT×Transformer closed-loop system. We align video/sensor/BIM/text at the component level via “Component-ID + Timestamp”, train a multimodal Transformer for operation-state recognition and short-horizon risk prediction, and then explicitly encode safety, resource, and spatial precedence constraints in a policy module to generate feasible task sequences, which are delivered to crews via AR with acknowledgments to close the loop. The system integrates multisource perception, digital twin, foundation-model reasoning, and AR-assisted execution, and was validated on a highrise self-climbing platform project for its overall improvement of construction performance. The evaluation covered four key aspects – safety management, operational efficiency, communication and execution, and information transparency. Results show that the system significantly extends the lead time of risk warnings, reduces violation rates, stabilizes construction rhythm, shortens decision latency, and markedly improves the consistency between instruction delivery and on-site feedback.

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Publication Details

Journal
Journal of Civil Engineering and Management
Published
2026-04-20
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3846/jcem.2026.26154
Primary Topic
Occupational Health and Safety Research
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
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article

An intelligent construction system based on digital twin and foundation model optimization

Cynthia ChangXin Wang, Xin Wang, Fengyi Guo, Jun Sun et al.
Journal of Civil Engineering and Management
Occupational Health and Safety Research
article

An intelligent construction system based on digital twin and foundation model optimization

Cynthia ChangXin Wang, Xin Wang, Fengyi Guo, Jun Sun, Kaixin Huang
article en

Abstract

Construction sites routinely face multi-trade concurrency, spatiotemporal coupling, and high safety risk; relying solely on manual inspection and heuristic scheduling often leads to lagging detection and inconsistent execution. In response, recent practice has introduced digital twins (DT) to fuse video, sensors, and BIM and thus improve site visibility; however, most implementations remain at monitoring/visualization, lacking a mechanism to convert cognition into executable, verifiable decisions. Meanwhile, Transformer foundation models show strong capabilities in multimodal perception and representation learning, yet they are rarely closed-looped with engineering constraints and on-site execution. Against this backdrop, taking high-rise self-climbing platform (SCP) operations as a representative scenario, we build a DT×Transformer closed-loop system. We align video/sensor/BIM/text at the component level via “Component-ID + Timestamp”, train a multimodal Transformer for operation-state recognition and short-horizon risk prediction, and then explicitly encode safety, resource, and spatial precedence constraints in a policy module to generate feasible task sequences, which are delivered to crews via AR with acknowledgments to close the loop. The system integrates multisource perception, digital twin, foundation-model reasoning, and AR-assisted execution, and was validated on a highrise self-climbing platform project for its overall improvement of construction performance. The evaluation covered four key aspects – safety management, operational efficiency, communication and execution, and information transparency. Results show that the system significantly extends the lead time of risk warnings, reduces violation rates, stabilizes construction rhythm, shortens decision latency, and markedly improves the consistency between instruction delivery and on-site feedback.

Journal of Civil Engineering and ManagementVol. 32(3)
UNSW Sydney (AU), China State Construction Engineering (China) (CN), Huazhong University of Science and Technology (CN)
Openalex Percentile: Top 18%
Occupational Health and Safety Research
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