Establishment and Application of Multi-agent Simulation System Based on On-Site Construction Performers

Despite the literature on multiple decision agents in the construction process, questions regarding the on-site behaviour of construction performers and their interaction with the site remain unanswered. The study aims to simulate the construction process based on the behaviours of on-site construction performers. It first establishes a multi-dimensional simulation environment that includes construction procedures, work plane and component states. Then the Spatio-temporal attributes of the construction performs are encapsulated into the agents. And last, the interaction mechanism between the agents and the simulation environment is defined, that forming a multi-agent-based simulation system for the construction process. The proposed system is developed using Python code, which can be applied to simulate short-term construction process with agents modeling, environment modeling and agents’ strategies et al. information imported, and a real case study is carried out through this way. The case study shows that the result of the established system has passed the verification of the traditional discrete event simulation result. And a construction strategy testing proves that this system can help managers to test and quantify the impact of different construction strategies so as to choose the most effective one to execute.