LEVERAGING PASSIVE RADIO FREQUENCY IDENTIFICATION TECHNOLOGY IN HIGH-RISE RENOVATION PROJECTS

The hypothesis is that leveraging automated data collection technology for site status analysis would play a more significant role in advancing decision making in construction projects if applied to traditional labor intensive management work tasks such as manual data record keeping, progress tracking measurements, and reporting of daily work tasks and process flows; and further, if applied in distributing information back to decision makers including the field management and workforce level. This paper will demonstrate results to a one year long case study on the design, development, and furthermore and mainly, the effective and very affordable implementation of a state-of-the-art wireless passive RFID based technology system that collects and distributes information from and to decision makers. The developed technology was tested for several consecutive months on more than 50 construction workers, material carts, personnel and material lifts, and hundreds of construction material items that were critical in a high-rise building renovation project. Recent research on material tracking, has demonstrated that the implementation of material tracking technology is feasible. Studies have yet to demonstrate whether the same or other technology can be used on other resource types, including workers, and furthermore in advancing technology that works bi-directional: (1) collect and analyze data, and (2) return feedback or other information back to the decision makers. Despite a rigorous cost-benefit, hardware reliability and safety tests, implementation of technology in field operations is often performed on an as-needs basis. Project based case studies are effective research tools to measure the benefits and barriers that technology comes with. This paper defines key metrics to measure success in the phases of data collection, the signal and data processing, and in the use of newly generated or already available information for advanced decision making based on passive RFID technology.