Self‐organizing systems in the construction industry

Abstract

AbstractSelf‐organization is found in numerous natural and artificial systems. For the construction industry, self‐organizing processes are not only applicable in managing or organizing tasks, they also provide insight into materials or can be implemented into operations on building sites. In this paper, the terms feedback, agents, emergence and self‐organization are described to provide an insight into the complex processes relevant to a lot of fields in the construction industry. For this, the principles of adaptive processes are transferred to artificial systems. Besides self‐organization in building materials, an outlook is given to describe construction sites as cyber‐physical systems. Inside such systems, agents learn to organize work tasks more efficiently, particularly with the help of reinforcement learning. In this regard, a transfer of natural self‐organization—which also exist in materials—to building processes is made. A combination of natural and artificial systems is presented to promote self‐organization for various fields of application in the construction industry, especially for building sites.