International Construction Specialty Conference of the Canadian Society for Civil Engineering (ICSC) (5th : 2015)

Self-calibrated WSN for indoor tracing and control of construction operations Ibrahim, Magdy; Moselhi, Osama

Abstract

Effective tracking and timely progress reporting are essential for successful delivery of construction projects. In this respect, several research attempts have been made to identify and track the locations of material, equipment and labor on construction Jobsites using wireless sensing technologies. Such developed methods utilize radio signal propagation models to estimate location based on measured received signal strength (RSSI). However, radio signal propagation models are highly dependent on the surrounding environment. As well, these methods are susceptible to interferences caused by metallic structures and obstacles, which are continually changing location on highly dynamic construction jobsites. This paper presents fundamental research work, designed to study the beneficial effect of self-calibrated wireless sensor network (SC-WSN) for higher accuracy of indoor localization. The developed SC-WSN hardware consists of fixed gateway unites mounted at predefined locations and mobile unites mounted on tracked objects. The designed network estimates a tagged object location based on its measured signal strength, which is then converted to corresponding distance using a dynamic signal propagation model. The developed dynamic model calibrates its parameters periodically to minimize errors in its estimated locations using particle swarm optimization algorithm. Experimental results are presented to illustrate the relative effectiveness of the developed system in comparison to commonly used fixed propagation systems.

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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada