Firdes Celik and Patrick Herbers, employees of the Chair of Computing in Engineering, and Master's graduate Maximilian Lucht are among this year's winners of the nationwide competition "Built on IT - Construction Professions with a Future".

For over 20 years, the RKW Competence Centre has been honouring the most innovative and practical digital solutions for young construction professionals as part of the "Built on IT - Construction Professions with a Future" competition. The award ceremony took place at the end of February 2024 as part of digitalBAU, the trade fair for digital solutions in the construction industry, in Cologne.

Category Construction Management

Maximilian Lucht, a Master's graduate from the Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering, was awarded first place in the Construction Management category for his work "Development of a concept for creating process simulation models of mechanised tunnelling using Python".

In tunnelling, process simulations can be used to evaluate different construction variants, identify bottlenecks or stoppages at an early stage and investigate complex interrelationships in the construction processes. However, acquiring the necessary simulation software is associated with high costs. Maximilian Lucht has tackled this problem and combined various open-source Python libraries to achieve a similar range of functions to commercial simulation solutions. A specially developed dashboard ensures that parameters for simulations in mechanised tunnelling can be adapted to specific projects without any programming knowledge. The execution and evaluation of the simulation are fully automated. Maximilian Lucht has also developed a method that uses machine learning to optimise the construction process and minimise the required construction time.

Category Civil Engineering

Firdes Celik and Patrick Herbers, research assistants at the Chair of Computing in Engineering, were awarded 3rd place in the Civil Engineering category for their dissertation project "InStand Digital: An AI-based application for the digitalisation of bridge inspections".

Bridges need to be regularly inspected for damage. In practice, bridge inspectors still work with a camera and a clipboard. Firdes Celik and Patrick Herbers are digitising and automating this manual and error-prone process with their Android app InStand Digital. Damage to concrete structures can be recorded with their app and analysed by a specially developed artificial intelligence system. This allows damage detection, description and assessment to be implemented efficiently. Firdes Celik and Patrick Herbers are currently being supported by the WORLDFACTORY Start-up Centre team. The spin-off is planned for 2025.

The development of the app can be followed on instanddigital.github.io.