Kamal Ranaweera

Efficient onsite data acquisition of a construction project enables the comparison of the actual state of the project to the as-plan state so that potential delays can be identified early within the project life cycle. Traditionally, onsite data are collected manually, a time consuming, costly and error-prone task, and therefore not justifiable in modern construction management. To overcome the challenges corresponding to such manual approaches, the application of automated progress monitoring of construction sites has attracted the attention of researchers. To enable an effective application, it is necessary to evaluate the reliability of the available technologies in collecting onsite data. In this paper, a qualitative evaluation of the applicability of the state-of-the-art automated progress monitoring technologies, namely camera, LiDAR, and 3D range imaging, has been carried out. A set of experiments has been carried out to compare the time of data collection for each technology. LiDAR provides the most accurate 3D estimates. The time of data collection of the Leica HDS6100 laser scanner is shown to be seven times faster than that of the DSLR camera in an indoor construction site simulated laboratory. However, the cost of LiDAR devices is the major economical drawback of the technology.

The productivity of a tunnel construction project can deviate from the predicted plan due to many factors, such as equipment failure, weather conditions and unexpected soil characteristics. Early detection of such deviations can help management teams to reallocate resources and take necessary actions to maximize the productivity. The real-time monitoring of actual productivity would yield tremendous information toward this end, but such monitoring is difficult, especially with remote construction sites. Therefore, the common practice has been to periodically obtain manually generated aggregated productivity reports from sites. These aggregated reports are not available to both site and office management in real time and may lack detailed information. To avoid these drawbacks, the research presented in this paper proposes an automated tunnel construction monitoring system to measure the productivity of the tunnel construction in terms of shift production (meters/shift). This system computes the shi...