Investigation of Data Transmission Between Construction Machines and Attachment Tools via OPC UA Technology

Construction sites require improved information logistics in order to obtain an efficient overview of the construction machine and attachment tools available on the construction site as well as their maintenance states. To enable data transfer to the central back office, an information technology integration of the machine and its tools is necessary. OPC UA is considered a potential solution to connect the devices and gather the information required. In this paper, a communication architecture using OPC UA is proposed to connect construction machine and attachment tools on the construction site with the back office. To evaluate the runtime performance of the communication architecture proposed, an experimental setup, which covers the communication on construction sites, is designed to measure the transmission time and data loss of the communication considering different PLC cycle times and data sizes. This paper contributes an order of magnitude for the transmission time and data loss in dependence of the performance class and cycle time of hardware devices.