Around 160,000 pages of test reports for construction material were received by the department each year. The existing workflow of handling these reports involves a number of manual processes. The laboratories would first submit the reports to the contractors or construction professionals. The contractors or construction professionals then classify, check and consolidate the relevant reports for further submission to the building control authorities for vetting. The building control authorities would carry out audit check on the submissions for their completeness and compliance with the statutory requirement. This current practice is not only labour-demanding but also vulnerable to human errors.
Funding from TechConnect Block Vote was secured in 2019 to develop an automatic platform for submission and checking of test reports for construction materials, as a pilot project, two main construction materials namely reinforcement bars and concrete were involved via the use of Artificial Intelligence, Optical Character Recognition and Document Management technologies. The system was called HeCheck – Housing Electronic Checking System for Test Reports Using Artificial Intelligence Technology. The idea and technologies were proven to be effective and suitable for such use.
To reap maximum benefits from the system, we are looking for migrating the system to HA Cloud environment and further develop the HeCheck to form a common recognized platform among laboratories, contractors, construction professionals and building control authorities. As a result, the laboratories, contractors, construction professionals and the building control authorities would not require repeated efforts to check manually one by one. In addition, we noticed the local trend of digitalization in the construction industry in which digital signature would be an important link for authentication. The proposed system should also be also to handle digitally signed reports.
Authenticated electronic test reports as well as the machine generated raw test result data are uploaded into the system. Then the system shall automatically identify and extract the required information from the electronic reports and countercheck the extracted result with the corresponding raw data to ensure the accuracy of the extraction. The extracted data would be check against compliance with the statutory requirement automatically. If non-compliance results were spotted, the users shall be alerted.
The expected system would be able to
a) streamline the submission process and consolidate the operations by different parties to be carried out in a common platform compatible with HA Cloud infrastructure;
b) classify, identify and extract required information from electronic reports in various formats;
c) automatically check the extracted results for their completeness and compliance with the statutory requirement;
d) provide a centralized database in storing test results data which user can easily find and sort the required cases for generation of summary and compliance reports; and
e) alert user immediately when non-compliance results were spotted.
