Safety is a big issue in the construction sites. For safe and secure management, tracking locations of construction resources such as labors, materials, machineries, vehicles and so on is important. The materials, machineries and vehicles could be controlled by computer, whereas the movement of labors does not have fixed pattern. So, the location and movement of labors need to be monitored continuously for safety. In general, Global Positioning System(GPS) is an opt solution to obtain the location information in outside environments. But it cannot be used for indoor locations as it requires a clear Line-Of-Sight(LOS) to satellites Therefore, indoor location monitoring system could be a convenient alternative for environments such as tunnel and indoor building construction sites. This paper presents a case study to investigate feasibility of Wi-Fi based indoor location monitoring system in construction site. The system is developed by using fingerprint map of gathering Received Signal Strength Indication(RSSI) from each Access Point(AP). The signal information is gathered by Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags, which are attached on a helmet of labors to track their locations, and is sent to server computer. Experiments were conducted in a shield tunnel construction site at Guangzhou, China. This study consists of three phases as follows: First, we have a tracking test in entrance area of tunnel construction site. This experiment was performed to find the effective geometry of APs installation. The geometry of APs installation was changed for finding effective locations, and the experiment was performed using one and more tags. Second, APs were separated into two groups, and they were connected with LAN cable in tunnel construction site. The purpose of this experiment was to check the validity of group separating strategy. One group was installed around the entrance and the other one was installed inside the tunnel. Finally, we installed the system inner area of tunnel, boring machine area, and checked the performance with varying conditions (the presence of obstacles such as train, worker, and so on). Accuracy of this study was calculated from the data, which was collected at some known points. Experimental results showed that WiFi-based indoor location system has a level of accuracy of a few meters in tunnel construction site. From the results, it is inferred that the location tracking system can track the approximate location of labors in the construction site. It is able to alert the labors when they are closer to dangerous zones like poisonous region or cave-in..
This research was supported by a grant(07KLSGC04 : Development of 3D data acquisition and verification system using latest surveying technology) from Cuttingedge Urban Development - Korean Land Spatialization Research Project funded by Ministry of Construction & Transportation of Korean government.