Influence of RFID technology on automated management of construction materials and components

Recent research has indicated that even though construction materials and components may constitute more than fifty percent of total project costs, existing methods for managing them still depend on human skills. This traditional data collection is time and labour-intensive, error-prone, and unreliable, due to the reluctance of workforces to monitor and record the presence of large numbers of material. Automating the task of identifying and tracking construction materials can provide timely and accurate information on materials available to the manager. This paper investigates a new approach for integrating the latest innovations in ADC technologies for real-time data collection in construction. In this approach, the combination of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), Global Positioning System (GPS), and General Packet Radio System (GPRS) technologies can facilitate extremely low-cost, infrastructure-free, and easy-to-implement solutions to uniquely identify materials, components, and equipment. The presented system is fully automatic and will lead to their location and tracking in three phases, namely, production sites (off-site), en-route (shipping), and construction job sites (on-site), almost instantaneously.