Materials management is a vital process in the delivery of construction facilities. Studies by the Construction Industry Institute (CII) have demonstrated that materials and installed equipment can constitute 40– 70% of the total construction hard cost and affect 80% of the project schedule. Despite its significance, most of the construction industry sectors are suffering from poor material management processes including inaccurate warehouse records, over-ordering and large surpluses of material at project completion, poor site storage practices, running out of materials, late deliveries, double-handling of components, out-of-specification material, and out of sequence deliveries which all result in low productivity, delay in construction and cost overruns. Inefficient material management can be attributed to the complex, unstructured, and dynamic nature of the construction industry, which has not been considered in a large number of studies available in this field.
The literature reveals that available computer-based materials management systems focus on (1) integration of the materials management functions, and (2) application of Automated Data Collection (ADC) technologies to collect materials localization and tracking data for their computerized materials management systems. Moreover in studies that focused on applying ADC technologies in construction materials management, positioning and tracking critical resources in construction sites, and identifying unique materials received at the job site are the main applications of their used technologies. Even though, various studies have improved materials management processes copiously in the construction industry, the benefits of considering the dynamic nature of construction (in terms of near real-time progress monitoring using state of the art technologies and techniques) and its integration with a dynamic materials management system have been left out. So, in contrast with other studies, this research presents a construction materials management framework capable of considering the dynamic nature of construction projects. It includes a vital component to monitor project progress in near real-time to estimate the installation and consumption of materials. This framework consists of three models: “preconstruction model,” “construction model,” and “data analysis and reporting model.” This framework enables (1) generation of optimized material delivery schedules based on Material Requirement Planning (MRP) and minimum total cost, (2) issuance of material Purchase Orders (POs) according to optimized delivery schedules, (3) tracking the status of POs (Expediting methods), (4) collection and assessment of material data as it arrives on site, (5) considering the inherent dynamics of construction operations by monitoring project progress to update project schedule and estimate near real-time consumption of materials and eventually (6) updating MRP and optimized delivery schedule frequently throughout the construction phase.
An optimized material delivery schedule and an optimized purchase schedule with the least cost are generated by the preconstruction model to avoid consequences of early/late purchasing and excess/inadequate purchasing. Accurate assessment of project progress and estimation of installed or consumed materials are essential for an effective construction material management system. The construction model focuses on the collection of near real-time site data using ADC technologies. Project progress is visualized from two different perspectives, comparing as-built with as-planned and comparing various as-built status captured on consecutive points of time. Due to the recent improvements in digital photography and webcams, which made this technology more cost-effective and practical for monitoring project progress, digital imaging (including 360° images) is selected and applied for project progress monitoring in the construction (data acquisition) model. In the last model, which is the data analysis and reporting model, Deep Learning (DL) and image processing algorithms are proposed to visualize and detect actual progress in terms of built elements in near real-time. In contrast with the other studies in which conventional computer vision algorithms are often used to monitor projects progress, in this research, a deep Convolutional Auto-Encoder (CAE) and Mask Region-based Convolutional Neural Network (R-CNN) are utilized to facilitate vision-based indoor and outdoor progress monitoring of construction operations. The updated project schedule based on the actual progress is the output of this model, and it is used as the primary input for the developed material management framework to update MRP, optimized material delivery, and purchase schedules, respectively. Applicability of the models in the developed material management framework has been tested through laboratory and field experiments. The results demonstrated the accuracy and capabilities of the developed models in the framework
