RFID in the Built Environment: Buried Asset Locating Systems

2015

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology has been widely used in the field of construction during the last two decades. Basically, RFID facilitates the control on a wide variety of processes in different stages of the lifecycle of a building, from its conception to its inhabitance. The main objective of this paper is to present a review of RFID applications in the construction industry, pointing out the existing developments, limitations and gaps. The paper presents the establishment of the RFID technology in four main stages of the lifecycle of a facility: planning and design, construction and commission and operation and maintenance. Concerning this last stage, an RFID application aiming to facilitate the identification of pieces of furniture in scanned inhabited environments is presented. Conclusions and future advances are presented at the end of the paper.

2007

Construction industry has dynamic and uncontrolled environments, where tracking components/materials and accessing related information are challenging tasks. Failure in effectively tracking components/materials and in accessing the related information on demand results in schedule delays and additional labor costs. Due to long read ranges, radio frequency identification (RFID) technology holds the potential for enabling automated tracking of components/materials in dynamic and uncontrolled environments. Also, on-board storage capacity of RFID allows for making information related to a component of a bulk of material readily available to the persons who are handling components and materials. This paper provides an overview of possible applications for RFID use and describes the field tests conducted in several research studies on utilization of RFID in construction industry. The field tests described were performed for tracking pipe spools and precast components during delivery and receipt, tracking precast components in a manufacturer's storage yard, tracking tools, locating materials and transferring material information to construction site. The results of those tests demonstrated that despite some limitations of the current technology, active UHF RFID meets the needs for the selected cases provided that some reasoning mechanisms are developed and implemented for data cleaning and processing purposes.

Among the array of innovative ICTs (information and communication technologies), radio frequency identification technology (RFID) can be considered as a major innovation with the potential to offer many new opportunities for construction companies to improve communication, facilitate teamwork, improve information management skills, and encourage greater cross-fertilization between business processes , Generally, emerging technologies such as wireless system, bar-coding and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) are not being adequately used to overcome human error and are not well integrated with project management systems to make the tracking and management of materials easier and faster. Finally, applications examples in construction industry are presented for highlighting its enabling employment, it is hoped that this paper will give a useful implications for RFID researchers and practitioners and provide a roadmap to guide future research.

Construction Innovation: Information, Process, Management, 2012

Purpose -Location awareness is essential to decisions pertinent to tracking and progress reporting, as well as to safety in construction projects. However, these applications have been mostly limited to the outdoor environment, where satellites for positioning information are in view. Recent studies on indoor location sensing systems are now overcoming this limitation and offering significant potential on construction practices, and radio frequency identification (RFID) is the most widely utilised technology for such application. The purpose of this paper is to address a wide range of protocols that are vital for RFID deployment for indoor construction. The paper identifies deployment settings to provide data acquisition with higher accuracy for indoor location sensing in construction. Design/methodology/approach -A computational platform was designed to assess and evaluate the most suitable condition related to deployment of reference tags in construction. In this platform, a number of protocols and parameters are presented and their performance is evaluated. The evaluation scenarios were performed on a construction facility in Montreal, as well as in a controlled lab environment. The computational platform used for the study comprises the use of passive reference RFID tags and K Nearest Neighbour algorithm (K-NN) for course-grained detection of target's location and its classification into pre-defined zone areas. Findings -The studies resulted in a number of observations, findings, and lessons learned for RFID deployment in construction. The results indicate that: the speed of the reader is in direct relationship with the detection error rate; zone configuration effectiveness is in direct relationship with the deployed RFID read-range; error rate on the controlled environment is significantly lower than rates in construction site; and stationary reader performs better than moving reader. Originality/value -The paper's findings are expected to be of considerable value to researchers and practitioners involved in the utilisation of RFID technology in construction. The paper provides a set of helpful protocols for the deployment of passive RFIDs for automated onsite management of construction operations.

This paper presents an experimental study conducted to facilitate the use of RFID on construction job sites. The study focuses on deployment settings to provide data acquisition with higher accuracy for indoor location sensing. It provides extension to the state-of-the-art in this field as it addresses the impact of metal media proximity to RFID tags, the reasonable duration for data capturing, number of RFID tags employed and the distance between them. Low cost passive RFID tags were used in the experiments where each tag is used as a reference point with a known location. Five hundred and forty (514) experiments were conducted in lab environment using a 3m by 3m test bed that is dynamically rearranged to generate 15 test beds and a total of 67713 data sets were collected and analyzed. The collected data were captured from nine locations for each test bed at four time intervals. Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) was used as the main attribute for signal measurement to process the captured data. Results of the data analysis performed are studied under four main categories: duration, number of tags, locations of tags and metal interference. The best duration was found to be the 15 second in the test bed with the least number of tags; as the short amount of time to capture data did not allow creation of a lot of interference among the emitted signals. Within each test bed, errors occurred most at points where the received signals were not well distributed in a 360 degree vicinity of the data capturing point. It means that the center point of each test bed resulted in lowest errors and the points located on the extremities led to the highest errors. Finally, metal objects were found to have major impact on the accuracy of the captured data; to the level where reliable values for errors could not be calculated in the test beds attached to metal objects. In summary, the results of the experimental study and related findings are expected to provide guidelines to the users of RFID technology for localization in building construction.

2009

With the increased interest in Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) in the construction industry and related research efforts, future construction sites can be expected to carry an abundance of RFID tags. These RFID tags at site have the potential to be used in order to improve context awareness during the construction phase. Specifically, semantic information about and between components and resources can be projected onto the RFID tags to create a semantically connected RFID network. Such semantic information might already exist when an integrated project model exists for the project. However, in cases where integrated project models for projects are uneconomical or cannot be made available due to other factors, the semantic information can still be made available for supporting context awareness on construction sites. A wide range of on-site tasks, ranging from actual construction to facility management, can benefit from the relationships represented in the RFID network and the ...

In construction industry effective inventory management is very much essential to define growth and success of a project. Recent researches have shown that even though construction materials and components contribute to 50%-60% of the total cost of typical project, conventional methods for managing them still rely on human skills. This leads to error-prone situations like counterfeiting, replenishment of stock and product misplacement. Because of these, emerging technology like RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) for real-time data collection is highly desirable. RFID facilitates the control on large number of materials which are required in every construction activity of building, from its planning to inhabitance. Case studies were done to identify existing problems and needs of industry. The findings reveal the demand for more sophisticated material management to improve material management processes. The paper presents the framework for RFID enabled inventory management system for real time tracking and identification of materials.

2007

Radio frequency identification (RFID) is an identification technique which has several advantages compared to traditional barcodes. One of these advantages is that RFID doesn't require a line of sight between the reader and tag which is being read. This makes it possible to embed tag inside identifiable product, where it can remain during products life-cycle without bothering the end user. There are RFID tags using several different frequency ranges and they behave quite differently while embedded into different materials. We tested the use of different RFID tags for identifying precast concrete elements. According to our preliminary tests tags working on high frequency (HF) worked better when embedded into concrete than tags working on ultra high frequency (UHF). After preliminary tests we tested the use of HF tags based on ISO 15693 standard in laboratory conditions embedded into different materials and finally embedded into concrete elements used in a construction project. HF RFID technology proved to be reliable way for identifying concrete elements, but some practical issues need to be solved before it can be taken into production use.

2013

Precast concrete components are basic element of modern construction industry. Their lifecycle involves many steps, in which the element's progress is usually tracked on paper. Similarly construction projects do not often have a formal information management process. Increased traceability and information management could address issues related to duplicated information management work, lack of real-time information, information delays and access issues. A study of how an information system can be integrated to the construction process and what kind of services can be implemented with the unique tracking of precast concrete elements is reported here. The tracking and data management is implemented with embedded RFID chips in each of the elements. The viability of building information modelling, traceability, management, gathering of quality management data and logistics location management services are shown to work with a series of pilot projects. The information system increases the amount and the detail of data, providing more tools for data management and reduces the amount of human errors involved in information management.

2008

With the increased interest in Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) in the construction industry and related research efforts, future construction sites can be expected to carry an abundance of RFID tags. These RFID tags at site have the potential to be used in order to improve context awareness during the construction phase. Specifically, semantic information about and between components and resources can be projected onto the RFID tags to create a semantically connected RFID network. Such semantic information might already exist when an integrated project model exists for the project. However, in cases where integrated project models for projects are uneconomical or cannot be made available due to other factors, the semantic information can still be made available for supporting context awareness on construction sites. A wide range of on-site tasks, ranging from actual construction to facility management, can benefit from the relationships represented in the RFID network and the resulting increased context awareness. This paper discusses the opportunities for creating such semantic RFID networks, and highlights challenges and benefits that the authors identified throughout their ongoing research activities.