CEE Graduate Seminar - Dr. Fei Dai

Fei Dai, PhD Professor of Construction Engineering Wadsworth Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering West Virginia University Friday, October 23, 2026 10:00 am 319 Benedum Hall "Jobsite of the Near Future: Simulation as the Decision Engine for Agentic AI in Construction" Abstract: Imagine a haul truck breaking down at 9:40 a.m. By 9:50, the site engineer has three options on screen, each with its expected effect on the day’s production, along with a recommendation and one clarifying question from an AI assistant. What would have to be true for that to work? This talk argues that the answer is simulation. Construction operations are stochastic, resource-coupled, and constantly disturbed, which is why a schedule alone cannot tell an engineer what will happen next. Discrete-event simulation can, by representing how crews, equipment, and materials interact over time and by answering “what if” before a decision is made. Yet simulation has largely stayed in the lab, because building and updating a model has always cost more time than a jobsite has. Agentic AI changes that equation. Large language model agents can read the changing world into the model, run the right computational experiments, and translate outcome distributions into timely recommendations, while knowing when to ask a human. Drawing on his group’s work in simplified discrete-event simulation (SDESA) and simulation-based scheduling (S3), Dr. Dai will introduce the fundamentals of construction simulation, show how AI agents can be grounded in it, and pose open scientific questions on model updating, uncertainty, and human–agent collaboration that are ready for graduate research. Biographical Sketch: Dr. Fei Dai is a Professor of Construction Engineering at the Wadsworth Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering of West Virginia University, where he directs the Integrated Construction Informatics Lab and serves as the Graduate Program Coordinator. His research focuses on dat