FIATECH

Overview

The focus of this project is to develop application tools and data delivery specifications for the life cycle of engineered equipment from specification, through procurement, to system design, operation and maintenance, while utilizing industry standards, i.e. ISO 15926 and AEX (as included in HI 50.7 and ISO 13709) for the exchange of data. A life cycle of engineered equipment can be defined as the period of time from inception to disposal, or when the equipment is no longer useful. Supporting the requirements for system design and quality control are key areas of development. This project will encompass several initiatives across the Capital Projects Technology Roadmap and in collaboration with other organizations.

Project Contacts

Technical Lead: Mark Palmer, NIST

FIATECH Project Manager: Sharon Bickford, FIATECH, 512-452-0835 or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Challenge

"Despite major investments in IT systems, owner-operators still face major challenges during operations in performing their day-to-day work due to a lack of interoperability between engineering design tools…and the host of other systems needed to support plant assets through the life-cycle.” - Adrian Park with Intergraph

Companies spend billions of dollars each year in the process of specifying, procuring, operating, and maintaining engineered equipment; much of it wasted in man-hours attempting to synchronize design documents, compare catalog and part numbers, track shipments, and assess real-time conditions. Fully integrated and automated application tools for the engineered equipment life cycle work process are needed to reduce this waste.

Benefits

Owner-Operators (OO’s) and Engineering, Procurement and Construction companies (EPC’s) in today’s capital projects industry require and demand application tools to fully integrate and automate their work processes. Current application tools available to these companies to specifically address the engineered equipment life cycle work process do not utilize a standard form of data exchange (e.g. ISO 15926). Companies spend billions of dollars each year in the process of specifying, procuring, operating, and maintaining engineered equipment; much of it wasted in man-hours attempting to synchronize design documents, compare catalog and part numbers, track shipments, and assess real-time conditions. Fully integrated and automated application tools for the engineered equipment life cycle work process are needed to reduce this waste.

Project Participants

Siemens PLM Solutions, NIST, TEEC (The Engineering Essentials Company) and EPRI

Collaborating Organizations

Process Industry Practices (PIP), the Hydraulic Institute (HI), API, Intelliquip

Project Status

Several initiatives are underway.

1) In conjunction with the Specification Automation project, the team is developing interoperability and oversight of tools for the standardization and efficient management of codes, standards, and engineering specifications, including data sheets.

2)As an extension of the AEX Project, collaboration continues with EPRI to develop application tools targeted at engineered equipment procurement in the nuclear power industry.

3) To complete Phase 3 of the GVCC project with PIP, the organizations are reviewing a proposal to provide for the commercialization of the GVCC software.

4) Capitalizing on the XML equipment schema developed under the AEX project, Intelliquip is beginning the process of assessing and documenting the alignment and differences of the HI 50.7 (AEX) data dictionary to the ISO 15926 WIP Reference Data Library (RDL). They will then document recommended modifications and alignment principles and process, and finally, do the alignment with the HI 50.7 data dictionary.

Project Deliverables

Refer to initiatives described under "Project Status."

Overview

This project is leveraging the successful past experience of FIATECH Smart Chips projects with sensing, and specifically, RFID technologies. In order to demonstrate the feasibility and accelerate the incorporation of passive RFID technologies in the construction industry, this project will be undertaken in three sequentially dependent phases, as follows:

1. investigate the two categories of passive commercial products (passive and BAP RFID) as the main variable of communications based on varying factors, such as read mode (mobile vs. portal configuration), read-tag communication protocols, proximity of signal-attenuating materials, and technical RFID characteristics, among others (Phase I);
2. based on Phase I results, identify the critical processes/activities that can be feasibly re-engineered around passive RFID with maximum return on investment and maximum impact on downstream operations based on surveys and/or interviews with industry representatives (Phase II); and
3. quantify the impact of the passive RFID technology −with metrics such as cost, schedule, productivity, quality, safety, for a re-engineered construction/supply chain processes/activity (identified in Phase II) by means of a short-term pilot test (Phase III).

Project Contacts

Technical Leads: Drs. David Grau and Yang Xiao, University of Alabama

FIATECH Project Manager: Sharon Bickford,  512-452-0835 or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Challenge

After the FIATECH/CII co-sponsored project “Leveraging Technologies to Improve Construction Productivity” successfully proved that active RFID technologies can actually result in large time and cost labor savings for materials tracking processes, the Capital Projects industry has actually shifted the attention to active RFID. Even though there have been some very successful deployments of this technology in the construction arena, the reality is that a majority of owner and contractor organizations are still holding back their investments waiting for the technology to decrease their costs. These organizations are not willing to invest in tens of thousands of active tags, the unit cost of which ranges between $30 and $80, and hence still leave site processes at the expense of a labor intensive and error-prone manual component. However, practitioners still point out their willingness to embrace RFID when unit tag costs fall below $5.

Even though EPC Class-1 Generation-2 UHF RFID passive and battery assisted passive (BAP) tags can be purchased at very low costs that can actually overcome this perceived cost barrier, there has not yet been a thorough study to determine their feasible application for supporting construction (and supply chain) processes. There is not even yet a study that has addressed the minimum RFID baseline characteristics for successful applications in unpredictable project sites. In reality, contractor organizations and individual decision makers are usually overwhelmed by the quantity of passive and BAP products commercially available. In front of them, important feasibility questions such as “Are passive and BAP RFID suited to support construction processes?”, and in particular “Are passive or BAP RFID tags and readers suitable for my particular application?”, “How will the passive system behave in a metal-crowded, obstacle-prone, unpredictable work environment?”, or “What return on investment should I expect from the RFID implementation?”, often remain unanswered and prevent the implementation of passive RFID solutions.

Thus, this study intends to overcome some of these barriers with empirical data in a three-step process: 1) investigation of passive and BAP RFID tag-reader communications in real project scenarios and in consideration of external and internal factors affecting these communications, 2) identification of critical processes that can be re-engineered around passive RFID with maximum return on investment and maximum impact on downstream operations, and 3) quantification of RFID impact in the performance of a selected critical process/activity.

Benefits

While passive RFID technology has been historically limited in terms of storage capacity and communication ranges, the fast-paced technical improvements of passive RFID over the last years, and their minimum unit costs, offer an exceptional opportunity to impact the capital industry with more intelligent and automated construction processes. Previous efforts have invariably focused on the deployment of battery powered and expensive RFID tags. In contrast, the potential of the latest passive RFID developments are currently being underestimated. In reality, the technology advancements in cutting edge passive RFID tags open up the door to new opportunities for their implementation in the construction industry ─ opportunities that are currently being missed.

Member Project Participants

This Project is headed up by David Grau and Yang Xiao with the University of Alabama.

David Grau (PI), Department of Civil Engineering - Dr. Grau is an Assistant Professor at The University of Alabama. Recently, his work has focused on combining lean principles and advanced sensing and information technologies to improve craft labor productivity for construction processes. Work in this area has resulted in the timely automation of asset tracking processes on the job sites by combining sensing devices and localization techniques, a work that has received a widespread attention from capital investors, contractors, and media. Prior to his academic career, David has worked as a corporate manager for more than seven years both leading an engineering department and managing a diversity of projects in South and Central America, and Europe. David is a registered Industrial Engineer in Spain and holds both a M.S. and a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin.

Yang Xiao, (Co-PI), Department of Computer Science - Dr. Yang Xiao worked in industry as a MAC (Medium Access Control) architect involving the IEEE 802.11 standard enhancement work before he joined Department of Computer Science at The Univ. of Memphis in 2002. He is currently with Department of Computer Science at The University of Alabama. He was a voting member of IEEE 802.11 Working Group from 2001 to 2004. He is an IEEE Senior Member. He serves as a panelist for the US National Science Foundation (NSF), Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI)'s Telecommunications expert committee, and the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS), as well as a referee/reviewer for many national and international funding agencies.  His research areas are security, communications/networks, robotics, and telemedicine. He has published more than 160 refereed journal papers (including over 45 IEEE transactions papers) and over 200 refereed conference papers and book chapters related to these research areas. Dr. Xiao’s research has been supported by the US National Science Foundation (NSF), U.S. Army Research, The Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI), Fleet Industrial Supply Center-San Diego (FISCSD), and The University of Alabama's Research Grants Committee. He currently serves as Editor-in-Chief for International Journal of Security and Networks (IJSN) and International Journal of Sensor Networks (IJSNet). He was the founding Editor-in-Chief for International Journal of Telemedicine and Applications (IJTA) (2007-2009).

Project Status

This Project is just starting. If you are interested in Passive RFID Technology and would like to join the Project Team to provide technical review and input during the course of the Project, please contact Sharon Bickford, FIATECH Project Manager: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Project Deliverables

The Project will produce the following deliverables:

• Technical report, both containing the summary and the details of the research project for Phases I, II, and III. The report will be similar in structure and type of content to those produced in the past for Smart Chips projects.
• Presentation slides summarizing the goals, methodology, analysis, and findings.

These deliverables will contribute to support the strategy for achieving the Vision of Roadmap Element #4 as explained below:

1. Discovery of RFID system configurations to optimally perform in real construction (and supply chain) scenarios
2. Guidance to practitioners and researchers in decision making processes so they can anticipate the feasibility and baseline behavior of a passive RFID system
3. Identification of supply chain/construction processes/activities with both the highest impact in downstream operations and the highest benefit to cost ratio
4. Quantification of performance impact of passive RFID to support supply chain / construction processes