Evaluating the Communication Infrastructure of a Digital Process Platform for Future Construction Sites

Abstract

The evaluation of digitalization approaches to construction sites, particularly in real-world field settings, is essential for measuring their added-value and hence their adoption in reality. For instance, communicating critical events in shortest time possible is substantial for construction site supervisors to enable timely response actions. Occurring latencies in communicating the data from the site to the decision makers represent an important object of study in any digitalization approach. In this paper, we evaluate the usability of a previously presented manufacturer-independent digital process platform for future construction sites under field conditions (see concept in [1] and implementation in [2]). We focus our evaluation on the communication infrastructure, especially measuring the latency of machine-generated data based on real-world construction use-cases, such as, geofencing and machine condition monitoring. Our evaluation took place under both field and laboratory settings and involved the message brokers RabbitMQ and Kafka. Finally, we discuss the evaluation results of the communication infrastructure and their impact on future construction sites.