Material Tracker for Construction Logistic

It is necessary to manage materials (including prefabricated components) and identify their data communication process by collecting relevant information in real time for effective and efficient material management in construction projects. Recently, there have been many studies and developments using various wireless technologies including Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) for acquiring material information in real time in the construction industry.

However, since existing research project and developments on the application of RFID technology have focused on identification of material and monitoring its logistics by only using RFID technology, they have limitations on identifying material moving flow in logistics and tracking location in an accurate manner.

Therefore, the objective of this research is to develop a system that can identify logistics flow and location of construction materials with better performance by using RFID and wireless sensor networks such as Zigbee technologies. The system developed in this research is named as material tracker (MT), and its technical feasibility was verified through a lab test comparing with the existing tracking method using RFID technology only.