Recently, within the framework of a POR Project and in fruitful cooperation with the enterprises AM General Contractor S.p.A. and Mantero Sistemi S.r.l., we developed a novel architecture aimed at tracking assets within construction sites. The main components are Radio Frequency IDentication (RFID), Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) tags, applied to assets, and smartphones, employed to track them. In more detail, the Asset Management DataBase System (AMDBS) stores within its tables the relations between the assets and the associated tags. When a BLE tag is detected, the AMDBS is queried and all the information, related to the asset which the BLE is associated to, is updated (e.g., its position).
RFIDs are employed to check when an asset is taken from a warehouse by workers who are provided with another RFID tag in order to identify them through the AMDBS.
Foremen are equipped with a smartphone, where two ad hoc apps, developed by the authors, called Asset Proximity Locator (APL) and Wandering Object Location Finder (WOLF), are installed.
The APL is automatically launched after the phone booting and runs as a background process; the WOLF is activated by the user whenever he desires to locate an asset. In practice, the APL implements all the functions needed to track the asset position.
The main merits of the architecture are its ability to maximize smartphone battery lifetime, that can reach an entire working shift, very satisfactory accuracy of BLE tag-smartphone distance estimation (with a mean error around 2 [m]) as well as high probability of detecting all the tags present in the construction site.
References
[1] Igor Bisio, Andrea Sciarrone, Sandro Zappatore, “A new asset tracking architecture integrating RFID, Bluetooth Low Energy tags and ad hoc smartphone applications”, Pervasive and Mobile Computing, Available online 15 January 2016, DOI: 10.1016/j.pmcj.2016.01.002.
[2] Igor Bisio, Andrea Sciarrone, Sandro Zappatore, “Asset Tracking Architecture with Bluetooth Low Energy Tags and ad hoc Smartphone Applications”, Proc. 2015 European Conference on Networks and Communications, 29 June-2 July, 2015, Paris, France, pp. 460-464, DOI: 10.1109/EuCNC.2015.7194118.
[3] Igor Bisio, Andrea Sciarrone, Sandro Zappatore, “Asset Tracking Solution with BLE and Smartphones: an Energy/Position Accuracy Trade-Off”, IEEE Globecom 2015, San Diego, CA, USA, 6-10 December 2015, pp. 1-6, DOI: 10.1109/GLOCOM.2015.7417782.