Element 4: Intelligent & Automated Construction Job Site

Tactical Plan

Download Tactical Plan in PDF | Working Team | Vision | Problem | Benefits and Opportunities | Barriers & Challenges | Goals | Strategy | Focus Areas & Projects | Timeline| 2007 Executive Summary

Scope

Provides the forum for construction practitioners, material providers and technology providers to make a concerted and systematic effort to identify, develop, deploy and evaluate the impact of the components, systems, standards and deployment strategies that are needed for successful Intelligent and Automated Construction Job Sites.

Founding Team

Aramco Services Company, Louis Archuleta
Arizona State University, Anil Sawhney
Bechtel, Ed Koch
Bentley Systems, Fran Rabuck (Team Champion)
Carnegie Mellon Institute, Dr. Burcu Akinci, Dr. Lucio Soibelman and Dr. James Garrett, Jr.
CH2M HILL, Mike Doleac
Fluor, Daniel Slade (Team Co-Champion), Randall Sulsar and AJ Jenkins
The Dow Chemical Company, Rob Wubbenhorst
ENC Corporation, Ismail Nalwala
Florida State University, Anime Ghanem (student member)
General Services Administration, Eric Albrecht, Curt Smith and Calvin Kam
Hanyang University Ansan, Saumya Swain (student member)
Hatch, Daryl Ofstie and Pieter Wolse
Intel, Mike Alianza, Michael Fenstermaker, Joe Gonzales, Dan Hodges, Chris Michaelis, Lama Nachman, Bob Predmore, Pete Rubino and Greg St.Clair
Jacobs Engineering, JJ Cameron, Prabhakar Manickam
KBR, Ross Porter, Troy Muller, Buddy Clark, Bryan Parsons, John Goetz, Bob Gutierez, Scott Hersho, Alan Harbert, Ray Williams, Robert Erickson and Charles Wood
NIST, BFRL, Gerry Cheok, Mark Palmer, Kamel Saidi and Alan Lytle
Optira, Mitch Schefcik
Penn State University, Vince Allen
Polytechnic University, Adis Sehic
The Procter & Gamble Company, Gil Torres
Purdue University, Dr. Mirek Skibniewski & Yu-Tzu Chen (student member)
S&B Engineers and Constructors, Mark Brown
Smithsonian Institution, Stephen DeLoach
Stanford University, CIFE, Dr. Martin Fischer
Target, Terry Breen
Texas A&M University, Jorge Vanegas
University of Calgary, Kasun Hewage
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Dr. Liang Y. Liu
University of Michigan, Vineet Kamat
University of Texas - Austin, Dr. Carlos Caldas
VTT, Arto Kiviniemi
Zachry Construction, Tom Hannigan, Todd Sutton, John Corzo, John Nix, Charles Poer, Doug House

Vision

The Vision statement describes what is wanted in the future.

The project site and construction processes of the future will be re-engineered to make use of emerging information and automation technologies to minimize capital facility delivery costs (labor, material and equipment), facility delivery time, and lifecycle costs. Linked to the Asset Lifecycle Information System, construction project management systems will continuously monitor the job site for compliance with cost, schedule, material placement and quality, technical performance, and safety. These advances will reduce construction time to a fraction of today's averages by more effectively orchestrating and closely monitoring the use of labor, equipment and materials on the job site, and will thus provide significant savings through schedule compression, material and work package optimization and labor reduction, with less rework for construction operations.

Construction sites will become more "intelligent and integrated" as materials, components, tools, equipment, and people become elements of a fully sensed and monitored environment. Location and status of all materials, equipment, personnel, and other resources will be continuously tracked on site, thus enabling a "pull" environment where needed resources are delivered on demand. Automation of construction processes will augment manual labor for hazardous and labor-intensive tasks such as welding and high-steel work. Construction job sites will be wirelessly networked with sensors and communications technologies that enable technology and knowledge-enabled construction workers to perform their jobs quickly and correctly. Because the facilities and construction operations are closely monitored and represented within an Asset Lifecycle Information System (see Roadmap Element 9), downstream facility operations will be made more effective with the availability of much better documentation about the history and current state of the facility.

Current Problem

The Current Problem statement describes the existing situation.

The construction industry lags behind manufacturing and transportation industries in terms of field-level automation. Construction requires information at the field level that is provided by design, engineering, and purchasing functions. Tools for automated information authoring, transfer, and collection have propagated into design, engineering, and purchasing areas, but not into construction field functions.

The advent of these automated information systems in design, engineering, and purchasing has increased the amount of information required to create, transfer, collect and update at the field leadership level, where "field leadership" is defined as construction craft foremen and supervisors up to manager level.

The information delivery and processing in the field has remained traditionally paper-based. Transmission to the field office can be electronic in some cases, but actual presence of information in the field working environment is still predominantly paper-based.

Wireless and display technologies are in their infancy. These devices are necessary to bridge the gap from office-based design and management systems to the field environment. Data collection and analysis systems to process wireless and automated sensory input into meaningful and relevant information for construction leadership have not been developed. While research into these applications and problems has begun in academia, technology suppliers have not begun actual prototype development and testing in field application environments.

The problem for the construction industry is that the information supplied and required at the field level has multiplied, but traditional manual processes are still in effect. The field level application of technology to process this information doesn't exist today, which limits the effectiveness and productivity of all facets of construction execution.

Potential Benefits & Opportunities

The primary benefits of the intelligent and automated construction job site will be significantly reduced construction time and cost, high-fidelity documentation of the as-built facility, reduced errors and rework, improved safety and security, and highly efficient supply of materials and product to the construction job site. The capabilities delivered also will yield significant benefits to upstream engineering and planning functions and the downstream activities associated with startup, commissioning, and operations and maintenance of the capital facility. Specific benefits that impact nearly all business and site operations are cited in the table below.

Potential Barriers & Challenges

While there are clearly identifiable benefits that would come from the development and employment of Intelligent and Automated Construction Job Site (IACJS) technologies, there are a number of barriers that must be addressed and overcome if the benefits from deploying these technologies are to be realized:

1. The construction industry has shown a notable resistance to adopt new technologies, partly because the fragmentation of the industry makes it difficult for a single organization to invest in the systems-level technologies being described and for those doing the investing to reap the benefits of those investments.
2. A healthy scepticism among construction practitioners has developed concerning the actual benefits to be gained from such investments in IACJS technologies. Many construction practitioners have tried to implement such technologies in one of their projects, without the luxury of extensive product comparisons, careful criteria-based selection, pilot testing, and careful measurements of return on investment, only to see their costs go up and their productivity go down. Such experimentation during operation is fraught with impractical applications of technologies, only to discover the need of additional guidance or controls to be practical and beneficial.
3. Many construction practitioners see no driving need to adopt and use IACJS technologies so long as they are not demanded, and thus not agreed to be paid for within the project budget, by the owners.
4. Those practitioners who have used IACJS technologies complain that they are not integrated into systems, become obsolete rapidly, use a variety of standards making the sharing of information nearly impossible, and are still too expensive to be justified for use on only one project, which is usually the case because the infrastructure currently must either be torn out (and hence be rendered unusable after three years of project usage) or left in place.
5. Those practitioners who are using IACJS technologies are at the bleeding edge and find no guidance as to the best ways to implement or deploy IACJS technologies on their construction sites.
6. Finally, many practitioners are concerned about security, reliable storage, and efficient and useful interpretation of the large quantity of data streaming off the job site.

Goals

The Goal statement describes what is expected to be achieved.

The primary goal is to deliver on the IACJS vision described above. To achieve this goal, a concerted and systematic effort is required to identify, develop, deploy, and evaluate the impacts of the needed IACJS systems, components, standards, and deployment strategies. With such an investment, construction practitioners who wish to select and deploy IACJS technologies for use on a specific project can much more easily do so and have a high degree of confidence that the technologies will yield reduced schedules and costs of construction operations. IACJS technology providers will also benefit from this effort and participate in the development of the standards, system architectures and system components.

Strategy for Achieving the Goal

The strategy statement describes how we see the goal being achieved.

The IACJS Tactical Plan uses a strategy of seven interdependent tasks that are applied to the Focus Areas. The level of effort required to complete each task will depend upon the scope of the Focus Area and projects and the maturity of the industry's understanding and capabilities. This strategy includes:

1. Determine the Functional Requirements of the IACJS.
2. Develop IACJS Operational Concept(s).
3. Cost-based Rationale for Investing in the IACJS Operational Concepts.
4. Assessment of Relevant IACJS Technologies.
5. IACJS Components and Systems Research and Development.
6. Development of IACJS Test Bed(s)
7. Deployment of Proven IACJS Technologies in Industrial-scale Pilot Projects

The seven tasks will be assessed against, and conducted for as required, each of the Focus Areas and projects described in the next section (and potentially others, as new needs are identified). The focus areas represent different facets of the Intelligent and Automated Construction Job Site, each of which has the potential for improvements that will contribute to minimizing capital facility delivery costs, facility delivery time, and lifecycle costs. The order in which the focus areas and projects are addressed will be determined by the working group based upon input from, and priorities expressed by the industry.

While the seven steps identified in this strategy section have been listed in a logical order from specification, through design, and finally ending with lab and field testing of technologies, it must be noted that many of these activities influence, and are influenced by the other six activities. The research, development and deployment described in the seven steps of this strategic approach will need to be iteratively conducted in order to evolve toward workable and cost effective IACJS technologies.

The following describes the seven strategy steps in more detail:

1. Determine the functional requirements of the IACJS - Before the construction industry can begin to deploy sensing and automated construction technologies on a construction site so as to deliver clear economic benefit, the desired sensing functionality needed on a construction job site must be determined. While a clear, correct and exhaustively complete description of that functionality is unattainable, some definition of the functionality expected from an "intelligent and automated construction job site" driven by the information needs from other parts of this capital facility delivery process is essential. Also, those functionalities expected to occur within this IACJS vision will drive the sensing and automation systems considered and deployed. Thus, this task will focus on defining the functions that drive the information needed from an intelligent and automated construction job site, such as: automated placement and assembly control, material handling and delivery, progress monitoring and trend analysis, compliance checking, building commissioning, health safety and environment monitoring and automated response. From this activity, a much deeper knowledge of the information required from the job site will be developed. This knowledge will be in terms of where, when and in what form data is needed. A much deeper knowledge of the desired levels and types of automated activity that will yield economic benefit on a construction site must also be developed.
2. Develop IACJS operational concepts - Once the definition of the intelligent and automated construction job site functionality is formulated, a variety of operational concepts (integrated set of systems that affect processes) that will deliver that functionality must be developed, fleshed out into system designs, and evaluated. This task will focus on generating, elaborating, and evaluating, at a conceptual level, a set of alternative integrated system designs. An example of a dimension over which these system designs will vary is the manner in which the sensors are deployed. For example, are the locations, types and schedules of sensors planned ahead of time, or are sensors ubiquitously and opportunistically placed in terms of time, space, and quantity being sensed? Another dimension over which these systems designs will vary is the control strategy used. For example, how does the system react to the information collected? Is all decision making done locally at the distributed sensing nodes? Is some central data awareness being maintained so as to provide higher level control functions? Can system design concepts from other domains be borrowed? The activities in this task will include defining operating principles expected of all such systems, defining a comprehensive set of dimensions over which the different systems will vary, developing a number of system design concepts for an intelligent and automated construction job site, developing criteria for evaluating these concepts, and evaluating the effectiveness of these alternatives.
3. Develop a cost-based rationale for investing in the IACJS operational concepts - The main purpose of this task is to develop models of the likely costs and benefits that would accrue from deploying the various IACJS operational concepts. This will involve a significant amount of modeling and simulation of the processes that would be affected by the use of advanced sensor networks and automated construction technologies. The results of this task will be used to identify specific operational concepts that appear to have some amount of promise of an economic impact.
4. Assess relevant IACJS technologies - This task will focus on developing a baseline of the currently available and relevant technologies for the IACJS operational concepts being considered. For some aspects of this IACJS concept, a great deal of this baseline development has been done; in other dimensions it has not. A thorough knowledge of the existing methods and technologies related to IACJS needs to be maintained, updated, and disseminated. The generation of these baseline descriptions of relevant technology and their applicability to the IACJS concept is one of the main goals of this task. In addition, the design of an IT system to disseminate this baseline knowledge to all IACJS researchers and developers is also a very important component.
5. Conduct research and development into IACJS components and systems - This task will focus on developing those technological components for which the baseline technologies are insufficient for delivering the functionality and operational concepts developed in the previously described tasks. The objective of this task is to develop tools for automated data collection, information capture, and feedback from the job site to eliminate manual data entry tasks while improving data integrity. Some of the needed technologies exist to link different systems, but real-time data feeds from the job site (such as robust wireless communications) are needed to enable true integration. The key research and development activities are given below.
• Open system architecture designs must be developed in order to allow for the use of existing and emerging sensing and construction automation technologies. Assuming that all technologies that may be used eventually on a construction site are known and designed for is simply unworkable. IACJS technologies and integration frameworks must be designed for almost constant change with respect to the component technologies being used.
• Process simulations must be done to determine the effects of these different technologies on the performance and efficiency of the various processes on a construction site.
• As a great deal of data will be taken away from a highly sensed construction site, advanced data representations, performance and condition models derived from this data, and schemes for communication of this data from and to the site, are all areas in which additional research and development will be needed to deliver the IACJS concepts.
• Development, testing, and validation of data analysis tools to transfer raw data into information for optimal decision making and general knowledge for the organization and industry.
• With the advent of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) manufacturing technology and other technological advances in computing, new sensors are emerging, or are able more easily to be manufactured, and must be assessed for their potential usefulness in construction contexts. (For example, embedded, wide-area, and satellite-based sensor technologies are all potentially applicable in the construction context, but must be further investigated and developed.) Providers of software and technology for wireless, automatic, and remote data gathering will be given guidance and specifications by the construction industry based on the realities of both the complexity of construction operations and the rugged environment in which inherently fragile technologies must robustly perform.
• As a construction site may not offer much in the way of accessible power in the early phases, the issue of providing reliable power to the network of sensors and other mobile information technology (IT) systems on a construction site over long periods of time (i.e., years), is the focus of this task. Construction sites offer a set of unique and demanding environmental and power delivery scenarios.
• An important aspect of this task will be to develop design principles and tools for the design of IACJS systems, such as sensor systems and construction automation systems. As we add these complex systems to our existing systems, we must provide tools for managing the complexity of these interdependent systems (sensor network, automation systems, and structure).
6. Develop IACJS test bed(s) - This task will focus on the design, development, deployment, and use of an advanced set of test facilities that will provide the first major tests of the IACJS concepts. This test bed will provide realistic environments in a laboratory setting from which proposed and developed IAJCS technologies can be tested for potential use on actual construction sites. For example, the RoboCrane was tested extensively within a well-defined and sensed test environment at NIST. Those concepts successfully making it through the test bed will then be candidates for deployment on actual construction sites.
7. Deploy proven IACJS technologies in industrial-scale pilot projects - This task will focus on deploying validated IACJS concepts in actual construction projects under actual project conditions. What we learn from this activity will influence all activities and results from the previous 6 tasks in this strategy.

Focus Areas & Projects

The focus area section describes what we are going to focus on, and specific projects are proposed within each focus area. Focus Areas are the broad description of what this Roadmap element is going to do. Each focus area will be addressed through several projects, conducted over time. The project titles are linked to the detailed project descriptions.

Project details can be viewed by downloading the PDF. The project template applied to each project includes: Project Title, Objectives / Deliverables (what result), Purpose / Business Driver(s) (why), Ties / Dependencies / Overlaps (with other projects or Elements) (constraints, boundaries), Urgency / Time line (when), Process / Activities (how), and Resources (who). Each project will be more fully defined as time progresses. At this point the project descriptions should indicate what the project will do in sufficient detail to get potential participants interested and to understand the timing and dependencies between projects. Timing or scheduling of these projects is presented in the section, the Seven-year Timeline.

E4-FA1: Standards and Practices - This focus area will deliver industry practices and information and communication standards to enable integration and automation of construction site operations and management.

Projects:

E4-FA1-P1 Information Exchange Standards for Construction Planning and Execution
E4-FA1-P2 Wireless Technologies
E4-FA1-P3 Information Exchange Standards for Supplier Integration
E4-FA1-P4 Construction Work Package Optimization
E4-FA1-P5 Construction Automation Guidelines
E4-FA1-P6 Automated Onsite Component Fabrication (single commodity, e.g., piping)
E4-FA1-P7 Pre-fabrication & Modularity (multiple commodities)
E4-FA1-P8 New Connection Methods

E4-FA2: Field Information Systems - This focus area will deliver field information systems technologies and deployment strategies to enable integration and automation of construction site operations and management.

Projects:

E4-FA2-P1 Information Display Devices
E4-FA2-P2 Modeling and Simulation Technologies
E4-FA2-P3 Project Progress and Site Monitoring Systems
E4-FA2-P4 Real-Time Sampling and Compliance Reporting for Turnover and Acceptance

E4-FA3: Positioning and Tracking - This focus area will deliver positioning and tracking technologies and deployment strategies to enable integration and automation of construction site operations and management.

Projects:

E4-FA3-P1 Personnel Movement Monitoring and Facility Usage
E4-FA3-P2 Dynamic Site Materials Identification and Management with Supply Chain Visibility - Functional Requirements
E4-FA3-P3 Local Area Position Recognition Technologies
E4-FA3-P4 Survey and Position Technologies
E4-FA3-P5 Skills Certification

E4-FA4: Construction Equipment and Technologies - This focus area will deliver construction equipment technologies and deployment strategies to enable integration and automation of construction site operations and management.

Projects:

E4-FA4-P1 Sensors
E4-FA4-P2 Multi-functional Equipment
E4-FA4-P3 Material Handling and Installation
E4-FA4-P4 Process Piping and Structural Welding
E4-FA4-P5 Rigging and Placement Devices
E4-FA4-P6 RFID

Seven-Year Timeline

A timeline is proposed for the projects within this tactical plan.

Assumptions used for the seven-year timeline shown below:

1. Preparation for each project will take about 3-6 months. Project preparation includes identifying funding, resourcing and set-up for that project.
2. 6-24 months is the typical time-frame for the actual work on each project (totaling 9-30 months, including project preparation per above).
3. Project teams will form and disband for each release (unless the team wished to continue).
4. The 'X' against each project in the following table indicates the proposed year in which to start the project.

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