June 29, 2007

Partnership speeds up IT research

Two outfits whose stock in trade is innovation in construction have signed a deal to co-operate in their efforts to speed research and adoption of mobile information technology in the engineering and construction industry.

FIATECH is a technology-based industry consortium in North America. COMIT (Construction Opportunities for Mobile IT) is a British-based, industry-owned group that, from its beginnings four years ago, has been devoted to bringing mobile IT to the industry in the United Kingdom.

The hope is that by pooling resources, more people will be available to work on research in the area and for solving the problems that so often seem to arise during the research process.

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Korky Koroluk

The two groups don’t do exactly the same thing. FIATECH’s purpose is to implement innovative technologies applicable for the entire lifecycle of capital construction projects. COMIT’s focus is entirely on the deployment of mobile IT.

This is good news for the industry. A lot of the research being done will eventually result in products priced low enough to appeal even to small and mid-sized businesses. Among them will be products and techniques that employ RFID — radio frequency identification.

I’ve written about RFID before. Think of it as a computer on a small chip that can be designed to do any number of things.

It has already gained fairly wide acceptance in the health care and automotive industries, and it was given a big boost in the retail sector when Wal-Mart announced that it would use the technology to track inventory, all the way from the order, through shipment, to the stock rooms in the individual stores.

There are wonderful possibilities for the construction industry, too, but it has so far shown a distinct lack of enthusiasm.

If you browse the FIATECH website, you’ll find a link leading to a paper called RFID in Construction. It’s a free download, although you might not want to read it all. (It’s 100 pages, and pretty dull, although the ideas it contains are exciting.)

Done by a group at Salford University in Great Britain, it outlines some of the expectations for RFID in our industry. Among the things being worked on right now are RFID in HVAC control systems, in systems that anticipate and respond to users’ needs, and provision for continuous monitoring of structures and service systems.

The key for monitoring systems is the ability to use RFIDs to analyze and diagnose stresses, corrosion and mechanical performance, and the ability to generate and transmit reports of faults and deterioration in performance.

Think of that for a minute. It means that an engineer will one day be able to turn on his handheld device and receive a report on the level of corrosion of the rebar in a bridge deck or the integrity of an entire structural system.

RFIDs will also one day be used in advanced fire-detection systems, which will include automatic wireless communications and control of protection systems.

One day, too, built-in sensors and communications systems will be used to provide detailed control of just about all building systems, as well as provide the means to use and communicate with some of the specialty technologies used in hospitals and medical laboratories.

Research in mobile technologies — especially RFID — will one day result in “intelligent products” capable of communicating location, orientation and condition.

RFID chips, says the report “represent the first generation of cheap communication devices which can be incorporated in any product.”

Some of this sounds like pie in the sky right now. But, remember, mobile IT is already in extensive use in some industries. Now we have organizations in North America and the United Kingdom that are working both to improve that technology and to encourage its introduction into every-day use within the construction industry.

Korky Koroluk is an Ottawa-based freelance writer. Send comments to editor@dailycommercialnews.com

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