Department of Construction Engineering & Management, King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals, Dhahran 31261, Saudi Arabia.
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716, USA.
Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2020 Mar 26;17(7):2219. doi: 10.3390/ijerph17072219.
Ultra wide band (UWB)-based real-time location systems (RTLSs) have been widely adopted in the manufacturing industry for tracking tools, materials, and ensuring safety. Researchers in the construction domain have investigated similar uses for UWB-based RTLSs on construction jobsites. However, most of these investigations comprised small-scale experiments using average accuracy only to demonstrate use cases for the technology. Furthermore, they did not consider alternative deployment scenarios for practically feasible deployment of the technology. To overcome these limitations, a series of experiments were performed to study the feasibility of a commercially available RTLS on the construction jobsites. The focus of the work was on feasibility in terms of accuracy analysis of the system for a large experimental site, the level of effort requirements for deployment, and the impact of deployment alternatives on the accuracy of the system. The results found that average accuracy was found to be a misleading indicator of the perceived system performance (i.e., 95th percentile values were considerably higher than average values). Moreover, accuracy is significantly affected by the deployment alternatives. Collectively, the results arising from the study could help construction/safety managers in decision making related to the deployment of UWB-based RTLSs for their construction sites.
超宽带（UWB）实时定位系统（RTLS）已广泛应用于制造业，用于跟踪工具、材料和确保安全。建筑领域的研究人员也研究了 UWB 实时定位系统在建筑工地的类似用途。然而，这些研究大多使用平均精度进行小规模实验，仅为该技术的用例提供证明。此外，他们没有考虑替代部署方案，以实现该技术的实际可行部署。为了克服这些限制，进行了一系列实验，以研究商业可用 RTLS 在建筑工地的可行性。这项工作的重点是针对大型实验场地的系统精度分析的可行性、部署的工作量要求以及部署替代方案对系统精度的影响。研究结果发现，平均精度是对系统性能的一种误导性指标（即，95 百分位值明显高于平均值）。此外，精度会受到部署替代方案的显著影响。总的来说，这项研究的结果可以帮助施工/安全管理人员在为其建筑工地部署基于 UWB 的 RTLS 时做出决策。
