A Taxonomy for Connected Autonomous Plant

National Highways commissioned the development of a Roadmap for Connected and Autonomous Plant (CAP), which proposed a programme of activities which would aim to deliver the widespread deployment of CAP. A particu-lar milestone activity identified as an early target within the Roadmap was the development of a taxonomy for under-standing the capability of construction plant for operating without human involvement. This would provide a unified language to understand how plant can be used to achieve tasks with reduced or no human intervention. This paper presents an overview of the process used in developing a tax-onomy to achieve this purpose, including the principles un-derlying the taxonomy, and the taxonomy itself. This builds on previous automation taxonomy work and applies it to the construction context and is further applied to two examples of autonomous compaction plant. It is concluded that the lev-els establish a unified language for the capability evaluation of automation of plant. This will support and catalyse the de-velopment of technology roadmaps amongst plant and tech-nology manufacturers, enable procurement processes that incentivise the deployment of CAP within construction man-agement, and support innovation practices by providing an understanding of the safety and operational implications of deploying automation on construction sites. It is also identi-fied that the application of this taxonomy is not limited to the Construction environment.