A development of next generation intelligent construction liftcar toolkit for vertical material movement management

High-rise construction sites, especially those situated in spatially-constrained urban areas, have difficulties in timely delivery of materials. IT-driven management techniques can be further benefited from state-of-the-art devices such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags and Ubiquitous Sensor Networks (USN), which have resulted in notable achievements in automated logistics management at the construction sites. Based on those achievements, this research develops USN hardware toolkits for hoists, which aims to automate the vertical material delivery by sensing the material information and routing it automatically to the right place. The gathered information from the sensors can also be used for monitoring the overall status. To support the system, a hoist-mountable intelligent toolkit was developed. Its feasibility test was conducted by applying the implemented system to a test bed and then analyzing efficiency of the system and the toolkit. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.