Background: As offsite prefabrication and modular construction continue to gain momentum into the future, material supply chain becomes increasingly complex for modern construction projects. Pre-engineered material supply presents itself as a driver for planning crew installation operations on site that involve skilled labor and heavy equipment. Methods: This paper proposes a framework for implementing the material-supply-driven project planning and control optimization approach to deal with material delays that take place at the piping spool fabrication shop. Design drawings, contract deadlines, resources availability and material supply patterns are extracted from a real oil and gas expansion project to validate the proposed implementation methodology.
With more and more industrial construction projects implementing RFID and other sensor-based technologies on fabrication and project sites, new innovative processes are needed to help automatically read and re-position RFID tags while reducing the cost to deploy RFID infrastructure over large areas. RFID tags are being used on construction sites to help identify the location of materials, equipment and personnel to aid in finding project critical materials and equipment required to construct the industrial facility on time and on budget. This research provides a cost-effective process for reading tens of thousands of RFID tags over large project sites from outdoor laydown yards, to warehouses to the workface where the materials and tagged equipment are installed. Based on the collected RFID and sensor data, localization mechanisms determine the most recent coordinates of the tagged components. The paper will cover analysis of RFID collected data and key lessons learned from a commercial deployment of the SiteSense® system with one Alberta-based industrial contractor, JV Driver Fabricators, at an 80-Acre module, pipe spool and structural steel fabrication site.
Timely information of construction resource is always a concern and an essential task for construction engineers and managers. In the recent past, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have emerged as a promising means to improve the current construction localization applications due to the ease of deployment and expandability to large scale construction projects, low cost, and capacity to function efficiently under dynamic and rough environments. Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) based localization is a popular technique especially for indoor environments, where satellite based positioning is infeasible. This study evaluates multilateration localization, a popular localization technique, in construction environments as well as a second, profiling-based, localization technique. Both techniques RSSI values collected in a WSN. Indoor experiments were conducted and their results reveal that acceptable position accuracy can be obtained with the profiling-based architecture.
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