Work

Use and Potential of AI in Assisting Surveyors in Building Retrofit and Demolition—A Scoping Review

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: Background: Pre-retrofit auditing and pre-demolition auditing (PRA/PDA) are important in material reuse, waste reduction, and regulatory compliance in the building sector. An emphasis on sustainable construction practices has led to a higher requirement for PRA/PDA. However, traditional auditing processes demand substantial time and manual effort and are more easily to create human errors. As a developing technology, artificial intelligence (AI) can potentially assist PRA/PDA processes. Objectives: This scoping review aims to review the potential of AI in assisting each sub-stage of PRA/PDA processes. Eligibility Criteria and Sources of Evidence: Included sources were English-language articles, books, and conference papers published before 31 March 2025, available electronically, and focused on AI applications in PRA/PDA or related sub-processes involving structured elements of buildings. Databases searched included ScienceDirect, IEEE Xplorer, Google Scholar, Scopus, Elsevier, and Springer. Results: The review indicates that although AI has the potential to be applied across multiple PRA/PDA sub-stages, actual application is still limited. AI integration has been most prevalent in floor plan recognition and material detection, where deep learning and computer vision models achieved notable accuracies. However, other sub-stages—such as operation and maintenance document analysis, object detection, volume estimation, and automated report generation—remain underexplored, with no PRA/PDA specific AI models identified. These gaps highlight the uneven distribution of AI adoption, with performance varying greatly depending on data quality, available domain-specific datasets, and the complexity of integration into existing workflows. Conclusions: Out of multiple PRA/PDA sub-stages, AI integration was focused on floor plan recognition and material detection, with deep learning and computer vision models achieving over 90% accuracy. Other stages such as operation and maintenance document analysis, object detection, volume estimation, and report writing, had little to no dedicated AI research. Therefore, although AI demonstrates strong potential in PRA/PDA, particularly for floor plan and material analysis, broader adoption is limited. Future research should target multimodal AI development, real-time deployment, and standardized benchmarking to improve automation and accuracy across all PRA/PDA stages.

Source: Buildings

DOI: 10.3390/buildings15193448