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BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article

Front. Built Environ.

Sec. Construction Management

Volume 11 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fbuil.2025.1678156

This article is part of the Research TopicAdvancing Automation in Design and Construction: Practices and ResearchView all 3 articles

Agentic Generative AI for Context-Aware Outlier Removal and Historical Cost Optimization in Construction

Provisionally accepted
  • 1University of North Florida, Jacksonville, United States
  • 2SSS Soft Solutions, Orlando, United States
  • 3Petticoat-Schmitt Civil Contractors, Jacksonville, United States
  • 4Cognizant Technology Solutions, Jacksonville, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Digital timecards are widely used in construction to track labor hours, equipment usage, and productivity, yet they are prone to outliers caused by human error, inconsistent reporting, and interface complexity. These anomalies degrade data reliability, obstruct cost estimation, and limit the strategic use of historical performance records. Traditional outlier detection meth-ods, such as Z-score filtering and standard Isolation Forest, apply global thresholds that often fail to capture the heterogeneous and context-specific nature of construction data. This paper introduces a context-aware optimization approach that dynamically tunes Isolation Forest contamination thresholds by learning from estimating practices. Validation results demonstrate that, compared to Z-score filtering and standard Isolation Forest, the proposed method pro-duces tighter clustering of standard deviations across cost codes, eliminates extreme variance spikes, and better aligns actual productivity distributions with estimator expectations. The model effectively filters unreliable entries while preserving meaningful high-cost cases, thereby improving both interpretability and reliability of historical data. To support scalable use of these refined datasets, the authors developed a production-grade agentic AI workflow integrating es-timating and field management software with Google's Firebase and an OpenAI GPT-based assistant via OpenAPI specifications. This system allows estimating and project management teams to query their data conversationally, retrieving real-time productivity benchmarks, unit costs, and historical trends across jobs and cost codes. While the model currently functions as a post-correction mechanism rather than preventing errors at the source, it provides a scalable, automated alternative to spreadsheet-based workflows, enabling improved bidding, project planning, and business intelligence.

Keywords: Outlier detection, Isolation forest, agentic AI, Construction Data Analysis, CostEstimating, Generative AI, Labor productivity, Historical data analysis

Received: 01 Aug 2025; Accepted: 22 Sep 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Kalasapudi, Angara, Tofferi and Varanasi. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Vamsi Sai Kalasapudi, vamsi.kalasapudi@unf.edu

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.