Have There Been Any RFID Deployments to Track the Status of Construction Projects?

Has the technology been used for this type of application?

—Stefan

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Stefan,

RFID is being utilized in construction mainly to manage tools, equipment, inventory and people on job sites. But there are several case studies that we have published regarding the technology's use to manage large-scale construction projects.

Bechtel is using RFID in the construction of three liquefied natural gas processing and export facilities on Curtis Island, an ecologically fragile mile-long speck of land off the coast of Gladstone, Australia. The facilities are being constructed to process coal seam gas (CSG) produced by collection facilities on the Australian mainland. The plants will purify the gas into a liquid state for export to customers worldwide. Bechtel needed an efficient, cost-effective way to track and organize the materials involved in the construction of the three facilities. The company selected RFID to serve as the data-collection heart of a new cutting-edge localized materials-management system (see RFID Helps Bechtel Manage a Megaprojects).

Australian solutions provider Industrial Automation Group has supplied an RFID system to a global oil company preparing a major construction project in a remote region of Western Australia. The firm has asked to remain unnamed, but the refinery will be built on the west coast of Australia, north of Karratha. The RFID team has begun testing tags and readers. At the site at which the new refinery will be erected, tags are already being affixed to some of the hundreds of thousands of tools, materials and components that will be used during construction. To build the refinery, the company will fly in workers from other metropolitan areas, while equipment, as needed, will travel many hundreds of miles. The company sought a method for monitoring the project once it is under way—to see actual products moving, view where they were located and receive alerts if anything is not onsite when expected, or is located in the wrong place (see Australian Oil Refinery Construction Site Tries Out RFID).

BP deployed a solution that used RFID and GPS technologies to track components shipped from its European warehouses to South Korea, when it was building a massive offshore oil platform in that country. This helped to ensure that the materials were delivered on time to Hyundai Heavy Industries, which was building the platform for BP (see RFID, GPS Bring Visibility to Construction of BP Oil Platform).

I hope these articles are helpful.

—Mark Roberti, Founder and Editor, RFID Journal