The Architectural, Engineering and Construction Industry and the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Fred Champion Chair in Engineering and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Southern California, Lucio Soibelman, will visit the Forty Acres to present a lecture titled “The Architectural, Engineering and Construction Industry and the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”

Abstract

The architectural, engineering and construction industry is responsible for the design construction, operation, and decommission of buildings and other facilities, transportation infrastructure, telecommunication networks, power grid, water distribution and wastewater collection systems, among many other important and complex systems. Those systems will require more and more that engineers provide continuous state awareness, assessment and proactive decision-making throughout the complete life cycle of the systems and the processes they create.

Today, during the current fourth industrial revolution, a new group of available digital technologies is allowing us to blur the lines between the physical and digital world, creating opportunities for the development of tools that will allow continuous state awareness and proactive decision-making to manage buildings and infrastructure systems in both normal and abnormal conditions, more efficiently and effectively. There are many technological developments and research projects that already support, or are beginning to support, this vision. Civil engineers, not just electrical and computer engineers and scientists can and should be involved in delivering this overall vision.

During this lecture, Soibelman will introduce his vision and work developed within his research group. His work focuses on the application and exploration of emerging Information and Communication Technologies, big data concepts, smart buildings, smart infrastructure systems, construction robotics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to a broadly defined set of infrastructure systems and associated processes, such as planning, design, construction, facility/infrastructure management, and environmental monitoring, to improve their sustainability, efficiency, maintainability, durability, and the overall performance of these systems.