Automatically Quantifying Movement of Prefabricated Building Components on Site for a Location-Based Management System: An Ecosystem for Digital Twin Construction

With the increasing availability of equipment to automatically monitor on-site construction, construction management should change considerably in the future. A data-driven construction management should be a system which receives periodically data from the field, reasons over construction information present on BIM models, and has a representation of the possible outcomes based on input data / information. Such scenario is one of the uses of Digital Twins for Construction. Instead of instrumenting the construction site, one option is to create “smart building components”, by attaching to each one of them an IoT device which will report their own state over time. Analyzing patterns on data from IMU and RSSI, as well as GPS when on open field, it is possible to identify and quantify movement and waiting times, as well as the precise moment in which a component installation happened – a micro-management more akin to Lean Construction. Although simplistically, this representation could be a prototype for a Discrete Event Simulation (DES). Construction progress monitoring thus become an automatic and remote process that could send signals and drive a representation of the process itself. Employing Location-Based Management System and Building Information Modeling, we create an ecosystem that takes advantage of the IoT solution to register and inform the decision makers over construction progress, allowing management of resources to remain on time and on budget with the advance of construction. In this paper experiments in real environments are presented with the automatic progress report of framing installation in the façade of a building.