Automated Monitoring of the Utilization Rate of Onsite Construction Equipment
Xiaoning Ren, Zhenhua Zhu, Chantale Germain, Roger Belair, Zhi Chen · 2017
The efficient utilization of construction equipment plays a significant role in engineering and building operations, since the utilization information is instrumental for construction equipment management and project cost control. Therefore, it is necessary to monitor the utilization rate of onsite equipment in order to maintain the efficiency of construction operations. In current practices, the monitoring of the utilization rate of onsite construction equipment mainly relies on the manual observations by field engineers, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. The main objective of this paper is to present a vision-based method to automate the monitoring of the utilization rate of onsite construction equipment. Under this method, the equipment of interest is firstly localized and tracked in video frames. Also, the positions of the equipment in video frames are extracted. Then, the location information of equipment is analyzed in comparison with the location information of work zones at the jobsite. Such way, the utilization rate of construction equipment in each work zone can be measured. Accordingly, construction professionals can conduct the further analysis, in terms of productivity analysis and equipment rental expense calculation. The method has been tested on the construction site of Poste De Lorimier in Canada. The test results demonstrated the capability and effectiveness of the method to monitor the utilization rate of construction equipment in an automatic manner.