A case study on the feasibility and performance of an UWB-AoA real time location system for resources management of civil construction projects

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The application of integrated satellite and modern wireless positioning technologies for ubiquitous real-time resources management in large scale civil engineering projects can greatly optimize the time and cost in the construction process, and is now the trend for modern construction project man- agement. As the outdoor conditions of most civil construction sites are open to sky, satellite position- ing with the popularly used Global Positioning System (GPS) has been proved to be very e‰cient and eective. However, the condition in indoor and underground construction site is very complicated due to the fact that dierent construction activities would be carried out in dierent congested areas, involving heavy construction plant, equipment, pro- fessionals and technical personnel. Nowadays dier- ent emerging technologies such as Wi-Fi and ZigBee can be adopted for position and tracking in indoor environments. Nevertheless, under the very com- plicated construction site conditions these technolo- gies may fail due to movement of human resources and construction plant, variation of metrological conditions, and serious multipath eects of signals. It is considered that Ultra Wide Band (UWB) tech- nology is more suitable for indoor construction site environments. In this paper, a case study on the attempt of integrating GPS with Ubisense Real- time Location System (RTLS) for resources man- agement in an underground railway construction site is discussed. Laboratory and field tests have shown that the RTLS can provide better resources management capability in terms of positioning accuracy and stability than Wi-Fi and ZigBee tech- nologies under complicated construction environ- ments. The test results show that the system can normally achieve better than 15 cm accuracy, and better than 1 m under adverse geometrical site condition. However, the high instrumental set up cost and the requirement for high quality data trans- mission cable for high precision time synchroni- zation between sensors may deter wide application of similar system for resources management in con- struction sites.