State-of-the-art and prospect of intelligent science and technology in civil engineering

Abstract

Artificial intelligence has brought new development opportunities and vitality to classical civil engineering. In the era of artificial intelligence, the development and innovation of civil engineering science and technology are bound to be deeply integrated with mathematics, computer science and emerging industrial technologies, such as intelligent materials, 3D printing, big data, Internet of things, intelligent computing, robotics, meta-universe and so on. Artificial intelligence techniques will also profoundly change the development of civil engineering in urban planning, architectural design, structural design, engineering construction, service operation and maintenance, disaster prevention and mitigation in the whole life cycle. The state-of-the-art research on intelligent science and technology in civil engineering from multiple dimensions, including intelligent materials, intelligent design, intelligent construction, intelligent operation and maintenance, and intelligent disaster prevention, were summarized. The naturally integrated characteristics of civil engineering intelligent science and technology on the basis of physical machine learning (merging data paradigm with physical laws) were presented. Meanwhile, the prospect of creating novel civil engineering intelligent science and technology by virtual scientists were discussed. Finally, the prospect of intelligent science and technology in civil engineering is outlined: establishing intelligence theory for civil engineering in pure data-driven and physical machine learning paradigms based on the existing knowledge system; developing an intelligent agent and its theoretical system with self-learning ability; eventually creating self-evolving virtual scientists to discover new mathematical methods and physical laws.