Design and first development of an automated real-time safety management system for construction sites

This paper reports a feasibility study which addressed the development of a new, advanced system mainly devoted to automatic real‐time health and safety management on construction sites. The preliminary analyses and experiments described in this paper concern two of the most important functionalities which must be included in the system's final release. The first functionality consists in real‐time position‐tracking of workers involved on construction sites and the second ‐ in a software tool for the prevention of non‐authorized access to dangerous zones. This research step is part of a vaster, ongoing research project, addressing the development of a new generation of advanced construction management systems which allow real‐time monitoring and coordination of tasks, automatic health and safety management, on‐site delivery of technical information and the capture of “as‐built” documentation. This paper focuses mainly on the development of a reliable methodology for real‐time monitoring of the position of both workers and equipment in outdoor construction sites by applying Ultra Wide Band (UWB) based technologies. This positioning system was then interfaced with a software tool which performs virtual fencing of pre‐selected, dangerous areas. Guidelines for the design of the receivers’ topology will be addressed and the results of measurements recorded on a typical medium‐sized block of flats, during different phases of the construction progress will be summed up. Finally, the preliminary experimental results obtained by the virtual fencing application tool will be presented and used to plan future research objectives.