A Survey on Applications of Artificial Intelligence for Pre-Parametric Project Cost and Soil Shear-Strength Estimation in Construction and Geotechnical Engineering

Ensuring soil strength, as well as preliminary construction cost and duration prediction, is a very crucial and preliminary aspect of any construction project. Similarly, building strong structures is very important in geotechnical engineering to ensure the bearing capability of structures against external forces. Hence, in this first-of-its-kind state-of-the-art review, the capability of various artificial intelligence (AI)-based models toward accurate prediction and estimation of preliminary construction cost, duration, and shear strength is explored. Initially, background regarding the revolutionary AI technology along with its different models suited for geotechnical and construction engineering is presented. Various existing works in the literature on the usage of AI-based models for the abovementioned applications of construction and maintenance are presented along with their advantages, limitations, and future work. Through analysis, various crucial input parameters with great impact on the estimation of preliminary construction cost, duration, and soil shear strength are enumerated and presented. Lastly, various challenges in using AI-based models for accurate predictions in these applications, as well as factors contributing to the cost-overrun issues, are presented. This study can, thus, greatly assist civil engineers in efficiently using the capabilities of AI for solving complex and risk-sensitive tasks, and it can also be used in Internet of things (IoT) environments for automated applications such as smart structural health-monitoring systems.