INFORMATION MANAGEMENT TECHNOLOGIES FOR IMPROVING EARNED VALUE QUANTIFICATION

Abstract

Real-time progress tracking of construction activities is critical for successful project monitoring and control. As such, the application of modern information technologies for progress tracking are proclaimed to overcome the limitations of manual approaches and hence contribute to the automated acquisition of onsite data for the computation of the earned value of progressed work. To this end, this paper presents a thorough review of 111 studies dealing with automated data collection and progress tracking on construction sites. The researched technologies were classified into four categories, namely: information technology, geo-spatial, imaging, and augmented reality (AR). It was found that research dealing with progress tracking using imaging technologies has been speedily growing over the years. The findings also revealed that the highest frequency (57) of reported technologies is found to be related to the AR category, with 74 percent of these studies having been published in the last eight years. Moreover, 63 percent of the studies were concerned with all kinds of project activities, with more specific areas of application reported to include concrete and steel elements, MEP elements, indoor and outdoor elements. The encountered technologies are reported to decrease labor hours and the time needed for progress monitoring, and automated data collection on construction activities progress is said to facilitate the generation of status reports and permit the early detection of deviations from the as-planned status.