Computing in Civil Engineering 2017 74

Automated Monitoring of the Utilization Rate of Onsite Construction Equipment

Xiaoning Ren1; Zhenhua Zhu2; Chantale Germain3; Roger Belair4; and Zhi Chen5
1
Dept. of Building, Civil, and Environmental Engineering, Concordia Univ., Montreal, Canada
H3G 1M8. E-mail: ryanren528@gmail.com
2
Dept. of Building, Civil, and Environmental Engineering, Concordia Univ., Montreal, Canada
Downloaded from ascelibrary.org by University of California, San Diego on 06/14/17. Copyright ASCE. For personal use only; all rights reserved.

H3G 1M8. E-mail: zhenhua.zhu@concordia.ca

3
Direction Ingénierie de Production Hydro-Québec, 855 Ste-Catherine est, Montréal, QC,
Canada H2L 4P5. E-mail: Germain.Chantale@hydro.qc.ca
4
Nouveaux aménagements et marches Hydro-Québec, 855 Ste-Catherine est, Montréal, QC,
Canada H2L 4P5. E-mail: Belair.Roger@hydro.qc.ca
5
Dept. of Building, Civil, and Environment Engineering, Concordia Univ., Montreal, Canada
H3G 1M8. E-mail: zhi.chen@concordia.ca

Abstract

The efficient utilization of construction equipment plays a significant role in engineering and
building operations, since the utilization information is instrumental for construction equipment
management and project cost control. Therefore, it is necessary to monitor the utilization rate of
onsite equipment in order to maintain the efficiency of construction operations. In current
practices, the monitoring of the utilization rate of onsite construction equipment mainly relies on
the manual observations by field engineers, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. The
main objective of this paper is to present a vision-based method to automate the monitoring of
the utilization rate of onsite construction equipment. Under this method, the equipment of
interest is firstly localized and tracked in video frames. Also, the positions of the equipment in
video frames are extracted. Then, the location information of equipment is analyzed in
comparison with the location information of work zones at the jobsite. Such way, the utilization
rate of construction equipment in each work zone can be measured. Accordingly, construction
professionals can conduct the further analysis, in terms of productivity analysis and equipment
rental expense calculation. The method has been tested on the construction site of Poste De
Lorimier in Canada. The test results demonstrated the capability and effectiveness of the method
to monitor the utilization rate of construction equipment in an automatic manner.

INTRODUCTION

The utilization rate of construction equipment is concerned with identifying the total available
time of the onsite equipment for production (Ahn and Lee 2013). The efficient utilization of
construction equipment plays an indispensable role on the success of a construction project. It
could contribute not only to support the construction equipment management, but manage the
project cost. In order to achieve the maximum equipment investment return, it is necessary to
collect the utilization information of onsite equipment in a timely and accurate manner.

Traditionally, the equipment utilization data collection is conducted by field engineers through
manually observations, which is time-consuming, labor-intensive and inaccurate. Thus, a

© ASCE

Computing in Civil Engineering 2017

 Computing in Civil Engineering 2017 75

plethora of studies have been investigated using tracking technologies, such as Global
Positioning Systems (GPS) (Pradhananga and Teizer 2013), Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) (Cheng et
al. 2012) and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) (Ergen and Akinci 2007). The tests have
showed the promising performance and ability to find the correspondence equipment and its
trajectory on construction sites. However, it is required to install tags or sensors on each piece of
equipment of interest using these technologies. This requirement limits their applications on
large-scale construction sites where tens of equipment needs to be tagged. Therefore, it is
Downloaded from ascelibrary.org by University of California, San Diego on 06/14/17. Copyright ASCE. For personal use only; all rights reserved.

pressing to identify a method to monitor and collect equipment utilization information in a cost-
effective and efficient manner.

The main objective of this paper is to present a vision-based method of automatically locating
and tracking the onsite equipment to facilitate the measurement of equipment utilization rate.
The construction site of Poste De Lorimier funded by Hydro-Qeubec in Montreal was selected as
the test bed. In order to achieve the goal, a high definition camera was statically placed at the
jobsite to record the construction activities. Under the proposed method, the construction site
was firstly divided into several work zones based on the construction site plan drawings, which
were highlighted in video frames. The equipment was detected and tracked in video frames, and
then their locations (2D coordinates in images) were extracted. Following that, the equipment
location information was compared with the location information of work zones to determine
which work zone the equipment resided in. At the end, a detailed report of the equipment
utilization in the corresponding work zone across time was generated for further analysis. The
utilization report could be used by contractors to facilitate the construction equipment
management. Also, it can be employed to assist the owners in verifying the bills of equipment
rental expenses. The results indicate the proposed method is effective and efficient in monitoring
the onsite equipment utilization information.

BACKGROUND

In recent years, a plethora research efforts have been placed on the automatic monitoring of
construction resources using state-of-the-art tracking technologies, such as GPS, RFID and UWB.
Numerous tracking technologies-based systems were developed to monitor project related
entities. For example, Caldas et al. (2006) investigated a study that aimed to determine the
potential benefits of the deployment of GPS technology for the materials tracking processes of
large-scale construction projects. Song et al. (2006) presented an approach whereby construction
materials equipped with RFID tags can be automatically identified and tracked on construction
sites without any regular site operations. Chen et al. (2011) conducted a study to measure the
performance of the UWB technology for tracking mobile resources con construction sites.
However, the need for the installation of tags on each entity limits their use for tracking on large-
scale sites where there are hundreds of equipment.

As an alternative, vision-based methods have gained a lot of interests in construction community,

since the cameras can capture a wealth of construction site information for decision-makers and
professionals. For example, in construction performance monitoring, Bohn and Teizer (2010)
introduced that cameras are instrumental in monitoring the real-time construction progress,
allowing for early detection of construction deviations and better planning for following tasks.
Memarzadeh et al. (2013) presented a vision-based method to automatically detect standing

© ASCE

Computing in Civil Engineering 2017

 Computing in Civil Engineering 2017 76

construction workers and idle equipment in site video streams. In resource tracking and
recognition, Brilakis et al. (2008) proposed a novel machine vision-based method for project
related entities tracking with construction cameras on open sites. Chi and Caldas (2011)
proposed a method for automated object detection for the moving equipment and personnel using
video cameras for heavy-equipment-intensive construction sites. In safety control, Yang et al.
(2010) developed a machine-learning-based multiple worker tracking scheme using video frames
for the onsite safety concerns. Han et al. (2012) proposed a vision-based method to detect unsafe
Downloaded from ascelibrary.org by University of California, San Diego on 06/14/17. Copyright ASCE. For personal use only; all rights reserved.

actions in site videos through motion capture techniques. Although the effectiveness of the
vision-based method in the engineering applications has been testified, few research efforts have
been investigated to demonstrate its efficiency in monitoring the equipment utilization. Therefore,
the main motivation of this study is to test the effectiveness of the vision-based method in
automatically monitoring the equipment utilization.

OBJECTIVE AND PROPOSED FRAMWORK

The main objective of this paper is to present a vision-based method for automatically
monitoring the equipment utilization on construction sites. With such method, contractors and/or
owners can obtain the equipment utilization information in a timely and automatic manner. Also,
an equipment utilization report can be generated for further analysis, such as equipment rental
expense verification and construction equipment management.

The proposed method mainly consists of 4 steps: 1) equipment detection; 2) equipment tracking;
3) work zone classification; 4) equipment utilization analysis. The positions of the utilized
equipment are detected, tracked and marked with the corresponding work zones. Then, a report
of the equipment utilization on the construction site can be generated to assist practitioners in
project cost control and construction equipment management. Figure 1 illustrates the overview of
the proposed framework.

New video
frames

Equipment Bounding Equipment Tracking

Detection Box Tracking Results

First video Equipment

Work Zone Work Zone Utilization
frame Utilization
Classification Information Report
Analysis

Site
Planning
Drawings

Figure 1. Flowchart of the proposed method

© ASCE

Computing in Civil Engineering 2017

 Computing in Civil Engineering 2017 77

Equipment Detection

In this step, the equipment was detected and enclosed with the bounding boxes in the first video
frame. Specifically, the videos were firstly extracted into images, which were divided into two
datasets, one training dataset and one test dataset. Then, the equipment recognition models were
trained based on the Histogram of Orient Gradients (HOG) method using the training images.
The equipment recognition models are focused on the most common used machinery types, the
Downloaded from ascelibrary.org by University of California, San Diego on 06/14/17. Copyright ASCE. For personal use only; all rights reserved.

excavators and trucks. When the equipment is detected in the video frame, the bounding box will
be used to initialize the tracker in the following video sequences.

Work Zone Classification

The second step is to classify the construction site into work zones in the image frame based on
the site planning drawings. Since the camera was statically mounted at the jobsite, the pixel
regions of the construction site in each video frame are constant. Therefore, pixel regions of each
work zone can be highlighted in the video frames.

Equipment Tracking
In this step, a particle filtering-based tracking method (Zhu et al. 2016) is employed to track
construction equipment. The effectiveness of the method in tracking construction related entities
under the occlusion and clutter conditions has been tested. After the equipment was tracked, the
centroid coordinates of the bottom boundary of the bounding box are computed. Then, the
centroid coordinates are used to compare with the location information of each work zone. Such
way, the location of utilized equipment is labeled in the corresponding work zone. Based on the
utilization information, the time of the equipment spent on the construction site is identified for
further analysis.

Equipment Utilization Analysis

The fourth step is to generate the equipment utilization report. After the acquisition of marked
equipment location, the equipment location information is tabulated along with the time and the
corresponding location information of work zones. It is common that the machinery is paid on an
hourly basis. No matter whether the activity they have done is a value-added one or not, owners
have to pay for the expense once they are at the jobsite. With such report, owners and contractors
could conduct analysis on the equipment management and verify the bills.

IPLEMENTATION AND RESULTS

Implementation
The proposed method had been implemented as a prototype in the Matlab R2015a platform. The
method was tested in a 64-bit operating system, Microsoft Windows 7 Enterprise. The hardware
configuration for the test includes an Intel® Core-i7-4770 CPU @3.40GHz and 8 gigabytes
memory, and an NVIDIA Quadro 600 GPU (graphic processing unit).

Project Background
In order to test the effectiveness of the proposed method, a high definition camera was placed on
the construction site, Poste De Lorimier in Montreal, Canada, to record the construction activities.
The project is funded by Hydro-Quebec, which is going to build a transformer substation with

© ASCE

Computing in Civil Engineering 2017

 Computing in Civil Engineering 2017 78

315/25 KV.
K Also, it is to place twot 315-kV undergrounnd lines of ab about 7 kilom
meters to connnect
the new De
D Lorimierr substation tot other subsstations. Thee captured vvideos were ttransmitted tto the
server thrrough the local wireless networking.
Results
A high definition
d caamera (Axiss P1425-LE E, Sweden) was staticallly placed aat the top oof the
building to record coonstruction activities
a into
o videos (Shhown in Figuure 2 (a, b)). All videos were
captured in the outdooor environmment with thee resolution of 1920 * 1080 at 25 frrames per seccond.
Downloaded from ascelibrary.org by University of California, San Diego on 06/14/17. Copyright ASCE. For personal use only; all rights reserved.

An exam mple of videoo frames is displayed in Figure

F 2 (c).

Figure 2. (a) Camera set-up

p; (b) Cameera placemeent; (c) An eexample of vvideo framees

Figure
F 3. Work
W zone cllassification
n

The consstruction sitee was firstlyy classified into work zzones in acccordance to the site plannning
drawingss, as shown in Figure 3.. Figure 4 illustrates thee equipment detection reesults. The ttipper
truck and d the excav vator are en
nclosed in th he boundingg boxes. Thhen, the cooordinates of each
bounding g box can bee obtained. After
A the acqquisition of thhe coordinattes of each bbounding boxx, the
particle filter-based
f tracker
t can be
b initializedd. As shown in Figure 5,, examples oof tracking reesults
for excavvator are deescribed. The excavator was movinng from one side of thee work zonee 2 to
another side.
s The traacker could keep
k trackinng even whenn the pose oof the excavaator was sevverely
changed. Similarly, thet tracking results
r for th
he truck are ddisplayed inn Figure 6.

Figure 4. Examples
E of equipmen
nt detection results

© ASCE

Computing in Civil Engineering 2017

 Computing in Civil Engineering 2017 79
Downloaded from ascelibrary.org by University of California, San Diego on 06/14/17. Copyright ASCE. For personal use only; all rights reserved.

Figure
F 5. Ex
xamples of tracking results for exccavator

Figure 6. Examples of
o tracking results for ttruck

After ob btained the tracking

t ressults, the ceentroid coorddinates of tthe bottom boundary oof the
bounding g box in each h video fram
me are calcullated. Since the goal of this study iss to automatiically
monitor the
t utilizatioon rate of th
he equipmen nt, the approoximate equiipment posittion can meeet the
monitorin ng purposess. Thereforee, the centrroid coordinnates of thhe bottom bboundary of the
bounding g box can be b assumed as the equip pment posittions. Then, the coordinnates are used to
compare with the loccation inform mation of eaach work zoone. Such waay, the equippment of intterest
can be taagged with the
t corresponding work zone. Figurre 7 shows aan example of the excavvator.
When th he equipmen nt is tagged d with the correspondding work zzone, a dettailed equippment
utilization report caan be generaated, as sho own in Figuure 8. Withh the report,, contractorss can
conduct the analysiss of the equ uipment utiliization rate calculation based on thhe appearannce in
work zon nes. Also, the
t equipmeent utilizatio on informattion can be used to veerify the billls of
equipmen nt rental exp
pense by own ners.

© ASCE

Computing in Civil Engineering 2017

 Computing in Civil Engineering 2017 80
Downloaded from ascelibrary.org by University of California, San Diego on 06/14/17. Copyright ASCE. For personal use only; all rights reserved.

Figuree 7. (a) Traccking resultss (b) Centro

oid coordinaates calculaation (c) Loccation taggin
ng

Figurre 8. Snapsh
hot of utilizaation reportt

LUSION
CONCL

The equiipment utilizzation plays an importan nt role on thhe success oof a construcction projectt. The
efficient equipment utilization doesd not suppport the coonstruction eequipment m managementt, but
ntly facilitatte the projecct cost contrrol. Thereforre, it is neceessary to moonitor and coollect
significan
the equippment utilizaation in an efffective and accurate maanner. The m main objectivve of this stuudy is
to propoose a vision--based meth hod for auto omatically mmonitoring tthe equipmeent utilizatioon on
constructtion sites. Under
U this method,
m a dettailed equipm ment utilizaation report can be geneerated
for decission-makers and professsionals. Thee utilization report coulld be used bby contractoors to
support the
t constructtion equipm ment managem ment. Also, it can be em mployed to assist the ow wners
in verifyiing the billss of equipmeent rental ex xpenses. Thee results testtified the efffectiveness oof the
proposedd method in the automattic monitorin ng of the equuipment utillization on cconstruction sites.
Besides, this method d is particulaarly suitablee for remotes constructioon sites wheere is not allways
accessiblle for engineeers to collecct data.

© ASCE

Computing in Civil Engineering 2017

 Computing in Civil Engineering 2017 81

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This paper is based in part upon work supported by the National Science and Engineering
Research Council (NSERC) of Canada. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or
recommendations expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect
the views of the NSERC.

REFERENCES
Downloaded from ascelibrary.org by University of California, San Diego on 06/14/17. Copyright ASCE. For personal use only; all rights reserved.

Ahn, C. and Lee, S. (2013). "Importance of Operational Efficiency to Achieve Energy Efficiency
and Exhaust Emission Reduction of Construction Operations." J. Constr. Eng. Manage.,
10.1061/(ASCE)CO.1943-7862.0000609, 404-413.
Bohn, J. and Teizer, J. (2010). “Benefits and Barriers of Construction Project Monitoring Using
High-Resolution Automated Cameras.” J. Constr. Eng. Manage., 136(6), 632–640.
Brilakis, I., Cordova, F., and Clark, P. (2008). “Automated 3D vision tracking for project control
support.” Proc., Joint US-European Workshop on Intelligent Computing in Engineering,
487–496.
Caldas, C.H., Torrent, D.G., Haas, C.T., (2006). “Using global positioning system to improve
materials-locating processes on industrial projects.” J. Constr. Eng. Manage., 132 (7)
(2006), pp. 741–749
Cheng, T., Mantripragada, U., Teizer, J., Vela, P.A., (2011). Automated trajectory and path
planning analysis based on ultra-wide band data, J. Comput. Civ. Eng. 26 (2012) 151–
160.
Chi, S. and Caldas, C. (2011). “Automated object identification using optical video cameras on
construction sites.” Computer-Aided Civil and Infrastructure Engineering, 26(5): 398-
380.
Ergen, E. and Akinci, B. (2007), “An overview of approaches for utilizing RFID in construction
industry.” 1st Annual RFID Eurasia, IEEE, 2007, pp. 1–5.
Fan, H., AbouRizk, S., and Kim, H. (2007) “Building Intelligent Applications for Construction
Equipment Management.” Computing in Civil Engineering (2007): pp. 192-199. doi:
10.1061/40937(261)24
Han, S., Lee, S., and Peña-Mora, F. (2012) “Vision-Based Motion Detection for Safety Behavior
Analysis in Construction.” Construction Research Congress 2012: pp. 1032-1041.
Memarzadeh, M., Golparvar-Fard, M., Niebles, J.C., (2013). “Automated 2D detection of
construction equipment and workers from site video streams using histograms of oriented
gradients and colors.” Automation in Construction, 32 (2013), pp. 24–37 ISSN 0926-
5805
Pradhananga, N. and Teizer J. (2013). “Automatic spatio-temporal analysis of construction site
equipment operations using gps data.” Autom. Construct., 29 (2013), pp. 107–122
Song, J., Haas, C.T. and Caldas, C.H. (2006). “Tracking the location of materials on
construction job sites.” ASCE, Journal of Construction Engineering and Management,
132 (9) (2006), pp. 911–918
Yang, J., Arif, O., Vela, P. A., Teizer, J., and Shi, Z. (2010). “Tracking multiple workers on
construction sites using video cameras.” Adv. Eng. Inform., 24(4), 428–434.
Zhu, Z., Ren, X., and Chen, Z. (2016). "Visual Tracking of Construction Jobsite Workforce and
Equipment with Particle Filtering." J. Comput. Civ. Eng., 10.1061/(ASCE)CP.1943-
5487.0000573, 04016023.

© ASCE

Computing in Civil Engineering 2017