Abstract Construction hoists at most building construction sites are manually controlled by human operators using their intuitions; as a result, unnecessary trips are often made when multiple hoists are operating… Click to show full abstract
Abstract Construction hoists at most building construction sites are manually controlled by human operators using their intuitions; as a result, unnecessary trips are often made when multiple hoists are operating simultaneously and/or when complicated hoist calls are requested. These trips increase a passenger's waiting time and lifting time, reducing the lifting performance of the hoists. To address this issue, the authors develop an autonomous hoist supported by a deep Q-network (DQN), a deep reinforcement learning method. The results show that the DQN algorithm can provide better control policy in complicated real-world hoist control situations than previous control algorithms, reducing the waiting time and lifting time of passengers by up to 86.7%. Such an automated hoist control system helps shorten the project schedule by increasing the lifting performance of multiple hoists at high-rise building construction sites.
               
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