▲ Wins in three categories at the 2025 Smart Construction Challenge, including the Top Innovation Award (Minister of Land, Infrastructure and Transport Award) in the Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Railway sectors

▲ Hyundai E&C to drive the digital and safety-focused evolution of K-Construction by strengthening its competitive edge in smart construction technology

Hyundai E&C has once again demonstrated its unrivaled technological prowess in smart construction, setting a remarkable record by winning awards at the Smart Construction Challenge for the fifth consecutive year.

Hyundai E&C announced that it won a total of three awards, including the Top Innovation Award in the Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Railway sectors, and an Innovation Award in the Complex & Housing sector at the 2025 Smart Construction Challenge awards ceremony, held on November 5th at KINTEX in Goyang, Gyeonggi-do Province. Since winning the Top Innovation Award and an Innovation Award in 2021 for its robotics technology and BIM utilization software development, Hyundai E&C has now achieved an overwhelming record of 12 awards in total over the past five years.

The Smart Construction Challenge, now in its fifth year, is Korea's leading construction technology competition, hosted by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport and the Construction Association of Korea’s Construction Co-Prosperity Committee to encourage the promotion and expansion of smart construction technologies. Awards are given in a total of five categories: ▲Building Information Modeling (BIM), ▲Railway, ▲Complex & Housing, ▲Roads, and ▲Safety Management. This year, the awards ceremony and winner presentations were held in conjunction with the 2025 Smart Construction, Safety, and AI Expo, where some of the award-winning technologies were exhibited.

Hyundai E&C received the Top Innovation Award in the BIM category for its ‘AI-driven Pre-con Automation’ technology, which fine tunes processes and material quantities by connecting to data repositories during the design phase before construction. This technology, proposed by a consortium including ITM Engineers & Architects, Bimsontop Engineering, and Gachon University, was honored for its remarkable efficiency in construction optimization, work time reduction, and risk minimization. Notably, the safety management technologies, which utilize Virtual Reality (VR) for risk reviews and are based on a Common Data Environment (CDE) that allows multiple workers to share and collaborate on the construction status, received high praise from the judges.

The AI Smart Safety System, which won the Top Innovation Award in the Railway category, is a safety management platform jointly submitted by Hyundai E&C, Innonet., and IVS. The system is centered around TV White Space (TVWS, a technology that enables communication using idle TV frequency bands), which Hyundai E&C introduced at an underground tunnel site in 2021 for the first time in the industry. Hyundai E&C has since been working to advance this wireless communication infrastructure by leveraging it in railway tunnel sites at home and abroad, such as the Incheon Metro Line 1 Geomdan Extension, the Saudi NEOM Running Tunnels, and the Wolgot-Pangyo Double-Track Railway Line. A key factor in the win was the presentation of smart safety technology that effectively prevents accidents at underground sites by linking AI video recognition and IoT sensors in real-time, thereby preparing for the upcoming era of relocating railway lines underground.

Last but not least, the Construction Site Material Transport Robot technology, which won the Innovation Award in the Complex & Housing category in collaboration with Samsung C&T, is an autonomous transport robot developed to automate the movement of a variety of materials at construction sites. This robot, optimized for construction sites using Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM)¹⁾ technology —which creates a map by recognizing the surrounding environment and discerns its own location—drew attention for its ability to both enhance work efficiency and prevent accidents by mechanizing material transport tasks and separating the movement paths of workers and materials.

A Hyundai E&C official stated with ambition, “These awards have once again recognized Hyundai E&C's market-leading smart construction technology, which has been verified through on-site demonstrations at sites both in Korea and across the globe for over a decade.” The official added, “Moving forward, we will do our utmost to advance K-Construction and enhance Korea's competitiveness by continuously developing safe and efficient systems that integrate advanced digital technologies and improve conditions for on-site workers.”

Hyundai E&C is continuing its streak of major smart construction-related awards. At the BIM AWARDS 2025, jointly hosted by the buildingSMART Korea and the Korea Institute of Civil Engineering and Building Technology (KICT), the company won the Grand Prize in the Engineering category for the ‘Gangbuk Water Purification Plant BIM Project, The Beginning of Smart Water Infrastructure.’ The project, a joint effort with Kunhwa Engineering & Consulting, received high praise from the judges for dramatically improving design productivity and quality by integrating Augmented Reality (AR) and Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR)²⁾ technology with BIM. 

1) Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM): A technology that enables autonomous navigation through environmental and topographic mapping, even in areas where Global Positioning System (GPS) signals are unavailable.

2) Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR): A form of remote sensing technology that detects light and measures distance.