Proposal for Tower Crane Productivity Indicators Based on Data Analysis in the Era of Construction 4.0

Thomas Danel,Zoubeir Lafhaj,Sophie Lienard,Anand Puppala,Philippe Richard

doi:10.3390/buildings11010021

Abstract

This article proposes a methodology to measure the productivity of a construction site through the analysis of tower crane data. These data were obtained from a data logger that records a time series of spatial and load data from the lifting machine during the structural phase of a construction project. The first step was data collection, followed by preparation, which consisted of formatting and cleaning the dataset. Then, a visualization step identified which data was the most meaningful for the practitioners. From that, the activity of the tower crane was measured by extracting effective lifting operations using the load signal essentially. Having used such a sampling technique allows statistical analysis on the duration, load, and curvilinear distance of every extracted lifting operation. The build statistical distribution and indicators were finally used to compare construction site productivity.

Highlights

Analysis in the Era of ConstructionAccording to the Cambridge Dictionary, “productivity is the rate at which a company or country makes goods, usually judged in connection with the number of people and the amount of material necessary to produce the goods.” The limited data available for the construction industry suggests that construction productivity has been declining for several decades [1,2,3]
The question is are these branches all suffering from this low productivity rate, or is one branch suffering more than the others? In the construction sector, productivity is twofold: on one side, it concerns the construction company and its organizational performance, on the other side, it concerns the construction project’s management on the construction site [4]
This article presented a methodology for exploiting data coming from the crane to provide productivity indicators of the construction site

Summary

Introduction

Analysis in the Era of ConstructionAccording to the Cambridge Dictionary, “productivity is the rate at which a company or country makes goods, usually judged in connection with the number of people and the amount of material necessary to produce the goods.” The limited data available for the construction industry suggests that construction productivity has been declining for several decades [1,2,3]. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, “productivity is the rate at which a company or country makes goods, usually judged in connection with the number of people and the amount of material necessary to produce the goods.”. The limited data available for the construction industry suggests that construction productivity has been declining for several decades [1,2,3]. On-site construction productivity is related to the total factor productivity taking into account the usage of the equipment, the working crew’s efficiency [5], the material use [6,7], capital and energy [6]. The lack of data makes it impossible to calculate this total factor productivity [8]

Methods

Results

Conclusion