Locating Materials on Construction Site Using Proximity Techniques

Abstract

Construction materials and installed equipment comprise 50-60% of the total cost of a typical industrial project. Tracking the location of construction resources automatically should both improve project performance and enable effortless derivation of performance indicators such as productivity. With recent advances in automated data collection technologies, tracking the location of materials on site has become more viable. A central issue in using these technologies for this purpose is that the existing approaches imply economically prohibitive deployment. This paper presents an approach by which a combination of RFID and GPS technologies may offer the opportunity to densely deploy RFID tags with a few mobile RFID readers equipped with GPS to form the backbone of a construction materials’ tracking system. The findings from preliminary experiments suggest that using this approach, RFID technology may be technically feasible in determining the 2D and ultimately the 3D location of materials on site, when combined with GPS technology. The solution proposed here is intended to extend the use of current RFID technology to tracking the precise movement and location of materials on site, without modifications to current hardware and at a magnitude less cost than pure GPS or other existing approaches.