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Civil-Comp Proceedings
ISSN 1759-3433
CCP: 81
PROCEEDINGS OF THE TENTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON CIVIL, STRUCTURAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING COMPUTING
Edited by: B.H.V. Topping
Paper 12

Development Structure and Performance Evaluation for Applying Wireless Transmission to the Construction Industry

L.K. Lin, C.L. Cheng and S.X. Li

Civil Engineering Department, National Taipei University of Technology, Taipei, Taiwan, R.O.C.

Full Bibliographic Reference for this paper
L.K. Lin, C.L. Cheng, S.X. Li, "Development Structure and Performance Evaluation for Applying Wireless Transmission to the Construction Industry", in B.H.V. Topping, (Editor), "Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering Computing", Civil-Comp Press, Stirlingshire, UK, Paper 12, 2005. doi:10.4203/ccp.81.12
Keywords: construction management, wireless transmission, construction quality, construction job-site.

Summary
The construction quality of each public construction program during the working process will have a relatively high influence on the citizen's use. In the future, the construction quality will have a great effect on public use. Construction job-sites have too many workers and are very complex. Such a situation is a great challenge to construction management. Once the performance of construction management does not work well, it not only makes the quality worse but also threatens the safety of the public. So how to use high technology wireless transmissions in construction management for each public construction project to improve and promote construction quality, is a useful research (refer to Figure 12.1). Nowadays, people always want to obtain real-time and reliability information immediately. Also the inspection information from the construction management shoulded be posted on the internet to make the information exchange more fast and convenient. So it will be an important solution to develop a real-time wireless transmission environment for public construction job-sites.
Figure 12.1: A practice test for wireless transmission on a construction job-site.

The South Asia earthquake of 26th December 2004, caused many buildings to collapse and resulted in many lost lives. Such disasters give a bad impression of the construction industry. On the other hand, during recent years the global electronics and technology industries have been the key elements of economic growth in each country. By comparison with the construction industry, products of the electronic and technology industry are developing and innovating constantly. These characteristics resulted in the industry's outstanding performance. Therefore, speed and urgency are the critical competition factors of the global market.

Today, if the inspection activity of a construction job-site can be combined with the wireless transmission technology, it will be more efficienct and the effectiveness of the construction management will improve. The beneficial result will fully depend on how to develop the structure of wireless transmission systems during the construction process.

This research investigates the feasibility of applying the wireless transmissions of PDAs and smart mobile phones as a communication tool to inspection engineers. The application of such tools on a construction job site can help all inspection engineers make better construction reports. Based on this development, all kinds of information regarding the construction activities such as standard specifications, figures, tables, equations, pictures, and so on, can be developed and supplied to the construction inspectors right at the construction job-site. For example, structural details and drawings can be shown on PDAs.

Based on this idea, this research will illustrate how to build wireless transmission into the management of a construction job-site. It then evaluates the performance of the resulting application. Finally, a real case study evaluation is undertaken to illustrate the application in practice.

References
1
Huang Jin-ting, "A Research of IEEE 802.11 Communication Protocol Improving Real-time Construction Management", Master Thesis, Institute of Civil and Disaster Prevention Engineering, National Taipei University of Technology, Taiwan , R.O.C., 2003 (in Chinese).
2
IEEE (1999b), IEEE Std 802.11b-1999 (Supplement to ANSI/IEEE Std 802.11, 1999 Edition).

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