Artificial Intelligence is promised to increase efficiencies in many industries, and enable new business models like self-driving cars. Many of the tasks that engineers work on today, won’t be the same tasks they’ll work on tomorrow, and artificial intelligence is expected to drive this apparent change in the profession. Companies are starting to work on various applications that automate the inspection of infrastructure through artificial intelligence, calculation of construction cost based on a few key parameters and statistical models, or propose finalized design solutions. Similar to self-driving cars, however, who some thought would already be deployed at scale today, the application of artificial intelligence doesn’t automatically solve all challenges, and the technology has to be implemented in a thoughtful way. This session will cover the potential, the shortfalls, and the challenges of artificial intelligence based on the example of a feature extraction algorithm that vectorizes aerial data from UAVs or aircraft, in order to automate the CAD drafting process. While there are certain limitations, Artificial intelligence has significant potential to advance the industry in making sense of massive amounts of data.
 
 The key findings we’ll present in the session are the following:
 § Use case and demonstration for software that creates CAD drawings autonomously by extracting features of aerial images;
 § How AI has proven useful in automating certain workflows, such as drafting of pavement markings, roads, utilities and topography
 § AI challenges such as in identifying and drawing accurate building footprints; requiring manual analysis, and often traditional surveying tools
 § How the adoption of AI will require more complex metrics of success, such as intersection over union and number of nodes as a measure for accuracy, and drafting time comparisons as a measure for efficiency, and how these metrics could look like.
 § Current results that demonstrate the potential of AI to reduce survey linework drafting times by at least 50%     

The role and potential of Artificial Intelligence in engineering, learnings from the automation of aerial data vectorization for land surveying

ASCE International Conference on Transportation & Development (ICTD 2021) is organized by the Transportation & Development Institute (T&DI) of ASCE to facilitate the exchange of information, knowledge, and best practices among transportation and development practitioners and researchers, public infrastructure owners, policymakers, government engineers and planners, operations managers, and leading academics from around the world.

Paper Proceedings: https://doi.org/10.1061/9780784483534 | https://doi.org/10.1061/9780784483541

Conference DOI: https://doi.org/10.26226/m.631784867747920012e73503