Although personnel entering a construction site are mandated to wear Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), hardly ever is PPE checked for accurateness, completeness, or whether its shelf-life has ...expired. Various commercially-existing automated identification (ID) and information technologies (IT) were used to design a mobile Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) portal for checking the PPE compliance of personnel. When such gates are positioned at the entrance or within construction sites and once low-cost passive RFID tags are embedded or attached to PPE, automatic site access, time recording, and completeness control can be performed. These improve the logistics of the existing compliance checking process and provide users with timely feedback. Results to “personnel entering a construction site” demonstrate how the safety process, especially the awareness among personnel wearing PPE, can be pro-actively managed and controlled. Data further suggests the limitations of the developed approach and its potential for gathering leading safety indicator data.
Display omitted
•Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) is hardly ever checked at job site entrances.•A mobile passive RFID portal that checks PPE compliance is introduced and explained.•It improves PPE control and management and provides rapid feedback to personnel.•A user interface enables pro-active safety education and learning for the workforce.•Field applicability and use in other areas (security/search & rescue) are explained.
The proper organization of work is to set the workflow to the slightest effort of man and machine operation to obtain maximum results. The article presents the problem of the allocation personnel, ...that occurs in a real company that provides construction services. The mathematical model for this issue was formulated. An algorithm solving the problem of personnel allocation is presented. The proposed analysis is a starting point for determining the production capacity and load of each workstation, which is particularly important when using multi-station work.
•Different construction methods influence GHG emissions in the construction phase.•A calculation boundary and five emission sources of semi-prefabrication are set.•A quantitative model of GHG ...emissions of semi-prefabrication is established.•Two cases with different construction methods are employed for preliminary comparison of the differences in GHG emissions.•Adopting prefabrication may contribute significant environmental benefits on GHG emissions.
Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the construction stage will be more relatively significant over time. Different construction methods influence GHG emissions in the construction phase. This study investigates the differences of GHG emissions between prefabrication and conventional construction methods. This study sets a calculation boundary and five emission sources for the semi-prefabricated construction process: embodied emissions of building materials, transportation of building materials, transportation of construction waste and soil, transportation of prefabricated components, operation of equipment, and construction techniques. A quantitative model is then established using a process-based method. A semi-prefabrication project and a conventional construction project in China are employed for preliminary examination of the differences in GHG emissions. Results show that the semi-prefabrication method produces less GHG emissions per square meter compared with the conventional construction, with the former producing 336kg/m2 and the latter generating 368kg/m2. The largest proportion of total GHG emissions comes from the embodied emissions of building materials, accounting for approximately 85%. Four elements that positively contribute to reduced emissions are the embodied GHG emissions of building materials, transportation of building materials, resource consumption of equipment and techniques, and transportation of waste and soil, accounting for 86.5%, 18.3%, 10.3%, and 0.2%, respectively, of reduced emissions; one a negative effect on reduced emissions is the transportation of prefabricated components, which offsets 15.3% of the total emissions reduction. Thus, adopting prefabricated construction methods contribute to significant environmental benefits on GHG emissions in this initial study.
Construction safety is a national and worldwide issue. This paper contributes in solving this problem by applying automated safety rule checking to Building Information Models (BIM). Algorithms that ...automatically analyze a building model to detect safety hazards and suggest preventive measures to users are developed for different cases involving fall related hazards. As BIM is changing the way construction can be approached, the presented work and case studies extend BIM to include automated hazard identification and correction during construction planning and in certain cases, during design. A rule-based engine that utilizes this framework is implemented on top of a commercially available BIM platform to show the feasibility of the approach. As a result, the developed automated safety checking platform informs construction engineers and managers by reporting, why, where, when, and what safety measures are needed for preventing fall-related accidents before construction starts. The safety area reviewed is fall protection. An example case study of such a system is also provided.
Display omitted
► Construction safety remains a national and world-wide issue. ► Rule-based engine detects safety hazards and suggests preventive measures to users. ► Algorithms for automated safety rule checking in Building Information Models (BIM). ► Different case studies involving fall related hazards are presented. ► Results show why, where, when, what safety measures are needed in constr. planning.
This paper presents a review of the literature on low carbon and low embodied energy materials in buildings. Embodied energy is defined and discussed vs. operating energy of buildings and its growing ...importance due to the implementation of the Energy Building Performance Directive (EBPD) in Europe as example. The difficulty of measuring embodied energy and the difficulty in comparing published data are highlighted, showing an example of proposed new methodology found in the literature. Relationship between embodied energy and embodied CO2 or CO2 footprint is defined. Different materials defined in the literature as low carbon materials are referred, such as cement and concrete, wood, bricks, rammed earth and sandstone. The review shows the research efforts found in the literature to develop new materials with less embodied energy. Finally, the effect of material substitution in the embodied energy of a building is reviewed in the literature.
The last decades, lowering the ecological impact of buildings is receiving increased attention by researchers, policy-makers and companies. Mostly the focus is on reducing energy consumption and the ...use of eco-friendly materials, but the concept of life-cycle thinking is growing in importance. This paper tries to give an overview of the current situation of Life cycle assessment (LCA) in the construction industry, both of regulatory developments and academic case studies. After a short history of LCA, the focus is on LCA methodology, new standards and frameworks and an extensive selection of recent case studies.
Despite some inherent limitations of LCA as an analytic tool and fundamental differences between the individual cases, still some common trends can be indicated. In standard buildings, the use phase contributes up to 90% of the total environmental burdens, mainly due to heating and/or cooling. Due to regulations, new buildings become more energy efficient, and thereby other phases of the life cycle gain in importance e.g., choice of materials, construction, end-of-life and water use. These research topics deserve more attention, together with economic issues, the improvement of data quality and implementation of probability density distributions.
The water of the Murgap River, which flows in the territory of the Mary Velayat in Turkmenistan, has been used in a wider and more complete way for many centuries than others. Dams and reservoirs ...have been built along this river. The abundant water of the river fully provided the people living in its valley, agriculture and animal husbandry, and contributed to the development of human civilization in its history. A dam is a hydro technical facility built to intercept the flow of river water, raise its level and use it properly. Over the course of history, dozens of dams were built along the Murgab River. The purpose of all of them was to carry out irrigation works and establish water supply for the people. Originally, dams were built from plant materials – various long-stemmed dry grasses, wood, soil, stone, stone and earthenware, but today they are built from a combination of concrete and reinforced concrete. Studying the history and construction practices of those dams is interesting and important today.
Additive manufacturing in construction is beginning to move from an architect's modelling tool to delivering full-scale architectural components and elements of buildings such as walls and facades. ...This paper discusses large-scale additive manufacturing processes that have been applied in the construction and architecture arena and focuses on ‘Concrete Printing’, an automated extrusion based process. The wet properties of the material are critical to the success of manufacture and a number of new criteria have been developed to classify these process specific parameters. These criteria are introduced and key challenges that face construction scale additive manufacturing are presented.
► Built a full-scale of extrusion-based additive manufacturing (AM) machine for Freeform Construction. ► Developed a high performance concrete for Concrete Printing process. ► Created a variety of prototype parts, including the world's first reinforced concrete AM component — WonderBench.
From the government's perspective, an electronic tender or e-tendering system in the procurement of goods and services in Indonesia is a platform to acknowledge good governance and public services ...since it enhances cost efficiency, effectiveness, shorter turnaround periods, delivers excellent public monitoring, fosters competitiveness, and increases government accountability. Nevertheless, numerous tenders have managed to fail during the implementation of e-tendering for construction works. The purpose of this study is to identify the factors that contribute to tender failures throughout the Surabaya City area. The factors that contributed to the tender's failure were identified from the results of the 220 construction tenders stated on the LPSE website. Descriptive statistical analysis was used to obtain factors that cause e-tender failures from the data obtained. Administrative, technical, price, and qualification criteria are the most dominant four failure criteria. The most apparent cause for auction failure is the provider's inability to attach references to previous projects.
In construction, about 80%–90% of accidents are associated with workers' unsafe acts. Nevertheless, the measurement of workers' behavior has not been actively applied in practice, due to the ...difficulties in observing workers on jobsites. In an effort to provide a robust and automated means for worker observation, this paper proposes a framework of vision-based unsafe action detection for behavior monitoring. The framework consists of (1) the identification of critical unsafe behavior, (2) the collection of relevant motion templates and site videos, (3) the 3D skeleton extraction from the videos, and (4) the detection of unsafe actions using the motion templates and skeleton models. For a proof of concept, experimental studies areundertaken to detect unsafe actions during ladder climbing (i.e., reaching far to a side) in motion datasets extracted from videos. The result indicates that the proposed framework can potentially perform well at detecting predefined unsafe actions in videos.
Display omitted
•The framework allows for the automatic detection of unsafe actions in site videos.•Computer vision techniques enable estimation of body joint positions on 2D images.•Using stereo cameras, a 2D human skeleton can be reconstructed in a 3D coordinate.•Dimension reduction can improve the accuracy and efficiency of motion analysis.•With motion templates, similar actions can be detected through pattern recognition.
PDF
