Hyundai E&C expands AI-powered Q-Pocket quality management system

Hyundai Engineering & Construction is accelerating the digital transformation of its construction sites through AI and big data-driven quality management upgrades.

The company announced Thursday that it will expand Q-Pocket — the smart integrated inspection system it first developed in 2021, a first in the industry — to cover all areas of quality management and extend it into a collaboration platform enabling all project stakeholders to share data in real time.

Q-Pocket is a mobile and web-based system for real-time on-site quality management, supporting everything from inspection and testing planning to materials verification and concrete crack management. When a defect is discovered during construction, workers can immediately file a report on-site and coordinate confirmation and subcontractor responses in a single step. That contactless, paperless workflow is registered as patent No. 10-1959459.

The upgraded Q-Pocket will incorporate QCON v3, a concrete quality management system, and will add new features including a defect management module linking concrete segregation and rebar exposure control, and an OSC management module for tracking factory-produced components used in off-site construction, a method that has been growing in adoption.

AI-based intelligent character recognition technology has also been applied, automatically registering quality managers' handwritten notes as photo data to improve the accuracy and efficiency of data management.

The standout addition is QCON v3. Hyundai E&C first developed QCON v1 in 2018 to streamline on-site concrete quality management by enabling mobile input of inspection results, then released v2 incorporating big data-based quality prediction patent technology.

QCON v3 builds further on that foundation by integrating public weather data from the Korea Meteorological Administration to support concrete pouring plans based on temperature and rainfall conditions, and by extending mobile management to cover cold-weather concrete curing accuracy as well as defect and crack monitoring. The upgrade allows Hyundai E&C to digitize the entire concrete quality management process within a single system.

The company is also supporting the broader adoption of its technology through partnerships with specialized IT firms. In August, Hyundai E&C signed a licensing agreement with Softzion covering three QCON-related patents, making its concrete quality management technology available for use across the construction industry.

"We will continue to advance our AI-based analytics and on-site data utilization capabilities, broadening the reach of our smart quality management technology while working toward full deployment across all sites," a company official said.

Meanwhile, Hyundai E&C posted consolidated sales of 6.24 trillion won ($4.65 billion) in the third quarter of this year, down 20.3 percent from the same period a year earlier. Operating profit, however, surged 114.2 percent year-on-year to 221.7 billion won.