Gwangju Official's 'Innovative AI Safety Management'... Gets a Month's Work Done in a Day

Developed in-house without outsourcing or a separate budget
Manages inspection schedules for bridges and tunnels, as well as records of cracks and repairs

A Gwangju city official has developed an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered safety management program based on problems he encountered in the field, enabling paperwork that used to take more than a month when preparing safety inspections of road facilities such as bridges and tunnels to be completed in a single day.

According to Jeonnam-Gwangju Integrated Special City on November 5, Shin Hae-seop, an administrative officer at the General Construction Headquarters, began using AI as a development tool in January and created the “Facility Safety Management Operations Platform.” The program was developed in-house, without outsourcing or a separate budget, and is now being used in actual work.

Facility safety management platform screen. Provided by Jeonnam Gwangju Integrated Special City.

Safety inspection standards and schedules for road facilities such as bridges, tunnels, underpasses and retaining walls vary depending on their type and size. With hundreds of facilities to manage, officials had to check inspection schedules for each one and prepare a separate bill of quantities each time they commissioned a safety inspection service.

Preparing a bill of quantities alone took more than 30 days. Repeatedly applying different standards to each facility and cross-checking related documents created a heavy workload, and there was also the possibility that procedures or results would vary depending on the official in charge.

To address these problems, which he had experienced firsthand while managing facilities, Shin began developing the program. He used AI to build functions needed in the field and incorporated complex inspection standards and repetitive paperwork into a single system.

The program automatically classifies facilities for inspection according to the applicable legal standards and determines whether a lower-level inspection can be omitted when a higher-level safety inspection has been conducted. This reduces the need for officials to check multiple regulations one by one.

Records of facility damage and repairs can also be reviewed in one place. The program gathers records of cracks and damage, along with repair and reinforcement work, that were scattered across individual inspection reports. This allows officials to track how damage at the same location has progressed over time. Inspection records can also be maintained seamlessly when the official in charge changes.

The biggest change is the time required to prepare documents. The city said that automating the preparation of bills of quantities for safety inspection and diagnosis services has reduced work that previously took more than 30 days to less than a day.

The program is also significant because it directly addresses problems identified by an official in the course of fieldwork. Since it was developed in-house without an outside contractor, the city can make its own changes and improvements when relevant standards change or new functions are needed.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.