Industrialised, Integrated, Intelligent sustainable Construction - I3con

SUSTAINABLE CONSTRUCTION HANDBOOK 2
- Equipment: Master, producer and organizational data in terms of a unique ID, operation
limitations, name of manufacturer, date of delivery, ownership, or required skills.
Figure 1. Extended model of the building life cycle (Lützkendorf and Lorenz, 2006)
Production
Similar to other industries like the automotive sector an efficient management of the Supply Chain
(SC) presents enormous potential in cost reduction, the avoidance of out-of-stock situations and
wrong deliveries as well as an increase in logistical processes. The construction industry could benefit
from improved standardisation of incoming goods inspection as well as the tracking and tracing of
construction materials and components (Simchi-Levi et al., 2003). Additionally, RFID enhances the
information flow among offices and sites in a construction supply chain environment and, hence,
improves not only work efficiency on the construction site, but also provides a dynamic operation
control and management for the whole project (Wang et al., 2007). Hence, the application of RFID in
the production process of buildings, in particular on the construction site, increases the economic
sustainability of construction processes and helps to reduce costs for material identification and
project control.
Material Identification and Quality Control. In comparison to barcodes RFID enables the
identification of materials like discrete solids, liquids, gaseous and metals as well as other
components. Currently, product identification marking mainly made directly on the product or
packaging by a worker with pen or chalk, as print on the side of the material or on a material layer, as
engraving or laser marking, or as label with or without barcode (König, 2009). For easy identification,
however, an RFID tag can be attached to each of the components. For expandable items, usually,
package labeling is used. Pallet-level tagging can lead to even more efficient identification of products
and reduce misdirected shipments and enables a more efficient consignment verification (Jaselskis et
al., 1995; Jaselskis and El-Misalami, 2003; Yagi et al., 2005; Srivastava, 2004; König, 2009). Fig. 2
illustrates the identification of building materials supported by a RFID system at the goods receipt on
a construction site. Furthermore, information about building materials, e. g. the name of the supplier,
the delivery date, the amount delivered as well as the method of delivery can be stored on the RFID
tag and enables the supplier as well as the consumer to trace materials and components, even if
delivered as freight consisting of different materials and components, in order to save time collecting
necessary information (Matsuda, 2005). Thereby, manual recording of inspection results of material
tests by paper-based documents can be replaced by RFID. An RFID quality management system can
serve as a platform for gathering, filtering, managing, monitoring and sharing quality data, as it was
already shown for concrete specimen quality testing in Taiwan (Wang 2008).
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