Design Assistant for Excavation Support System in Large Construction Project

Abstract: Previous expert systems for excavation support system (ESS) recommendations often overlooked lateral supports and water-barrier methods, limiting their applicability to small projects with a single retaining wall type. These methods were unsuitable for large-scale projects, where varying site conditions require different ESS configurations for each excavation side. This study proposes an ESS design assistant tailored for large construction projects. While LLMs like GPT-4.0 and DeepSeek show promise, they struggle with practical ESS recommendations. To address this, we developed a multi-step machine learning-based ESS recommendation system, achieving weighted F1 scores of 0.951 (retaining walls), 0.981 (water-barrier applications), and 0.831 (lateral supports).