Abstract
Monitoring of building process activities is the basis for effective control and management of a building project. In its traditional way it is, however, time consuming, inaccurate and expensive. To improve the monitoring process researchers are investigating methods to automate monitoring and support project managers with accurate and timely information about activity progress. The chapter describes some of these methods and then concentrates on a solution, which takes into account all three aspects of project management: coordination, control and communication. Activity progress is monitored directly by using a combination of data collection methods, which are based on the building information model (BIM), especially on the 4D model of the building. The resulting system is described, evaluated and discussed.
Top2 Automated Monitoring Systems
Most of the present research in automated monitoring of construction project activities is based on direct identification of already built construction elements. In this section some of the current research projects and results will be presented in a more detail. Additionally, research based on indirect approach of tracking material resources is considered due to global trends in RFID development and application.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Image Recognition: The process of automatically recognize objects on an image.
Material Resource Tracking: Following the path of raw material or prefabricated elements used as resources in building activities, from origin to destination
Image Segmentation: Extracting various levels of information (colours, gradient, textures etc) from an image.
RFID: Radio-Frequency Identification is a technology that incorporates the use of electromagnetic or electrostatic coupling in the radio frequency (RF) portion of the electromagnetic spectrum to uniquely identify an object.
Laser Scanning: The process of shining a structured laser line over the surface of an object in order to collect 3-dimensional data.
Automated Monitoring: Monitoring of activity parameters by automatically generate and process input data (like digital images).
4D CAD: A CAD system that allows to interlink 3D elements of a building with the corresponding activity in the schedule plan, which gives each element the 4th dimension for the duration of the building process.