Multi-Sensor Data Collection, Fusion, and Analytics to Support Effective Performance Measures in Construction Projects

尽管关于建筑生产率是否在下降仍有争议，但有一点是一致的，即改进的空间很大。考虑一个经常被重复的短语：“你不能改善你不衡量的东西。”因此，提供有效的建筑生产力措施变得至关重要，并已被确定为未来2至10年突破性提高建筑效率和竞争力的五个机会之一。本研究的目的是探讨整合来自视频、声学、热和其他物联网（IoT）传感器的多感官数据的可行性，以促进建筑工地施工作业生产率的衡量。提出的研究工作包括三个主要步骤。它首先设计了一个便携式多传感器硬件平台，可以很容易地部署来监控现场施工作业。然后进行数据融合分析，从监测数据中检索施工作业信息。对检索到的信息进行进一步探索，以发现和模拟现场的实际施工操作过程。通过这种方式，可以以更少的时间、成本和所需的努力，以系统的方式测量和分析过程中施工操作的生产率。这项研究预计将帮助承包商和/或分包商更频繁地评估他们的工作效率（例如，每小时或每天），以便能够迅速发现和纠正正在进行的建筑项目的生产力问题。研究工作的有效性将在加拿大魁北克省的实际建设项目中进行评估。

Although there is still a debate on whether construction productivity is declining or not, one note of agreement is that the room for improvement is significant. Consider an often-repeated phrase that “You can't improve what you don't measure.” Therefore, providing the effective measures of construction productivity becomes essential and has been identified as one of five opportunities for breakthrough improvements in construction efficiency and competitiveness in the next 2 to 10 years. The objective of this research is to investigate the feasibility of integrating multi-sensory data from video, acoustic, thermal, and other Internet of Things (IoT) sensors to facilitate the measures of construction operation productivity on a construction site. The proposed research work includes three main steps. It starts with the design of a portable multi-sensor hardware platform that could be easily deployed to monitor onsite construction operations. Then, the data fusion and analysis are conducted to retrieve construction operation information from the monitoring data. The retrieved information is further explored to discover and model real construction operation processes on the site. This way, the productivity of the construction operations in the processes could be measured and analyzed in a systematic way with less time, cost, and efforts required. The research is expected to help contractors and/or subcontractors evaluate the efficiency of their work more often (e.g. on an hourly or daily basis), so that the productivity problems on active construction projects could be detected and corrected quickly. The effectiveness of the research work will be evaluated in real construction projects in Quebec, Canada.