Automating the Reporting and Progress Monitoring Process using Mobile Computers for Highway Construction Projects

Construction is an industry that generates vast amounts of data related to construction, inspection and administration processes. Current practices employed in the construction industry for collecting, processing and filing all the documents associated to a construction job can take a lot of valuable time for the engineers in a project. Currently the university is working on a mobile computing application for automating the collection process of field inspection data using iPads or Android Tablets. The application contains standard forms of the specifications that appear in the Standard Specification of Road and Bridge Construction book. With these forms the application provides a method of uniform inspection that assures the quality of highway projects. At the same time the application will be able to automatically send deficiency reports to the parts affected when a certain item does not comply with the specification. This process will make the inspection much more efficient, reducing the use of paper forms and time consumed in manipulating data, therefore providing an automated optimized application that will allow inspection and reporting in less time. This proposal presents an extension to the application in development by implementing other kinds of reports and actions that will complement the features of the application. The proposed second phase of the automation process will provide the ability to create daily reports, generate reports for the project administrator and automatically relate data from different reports to include this information in the administrator's report in order to save time and provide a higher quality assurance. At the same time, the application will allow for continuous monitoring of project performance, because a daily S curve (cost based) can be prepared based on the inspector's report of work performed by the contractor. By doing so, the inspection team can verify at any time if the project is behind or ahead of schedule, comparing the percent complete at any particular moment with the percent complete calculated from the cost loaded schedule. This could be a very useful tool to discuss the project status with the contractor at the weekly meetings.

Language

  • English

Project

  • Status: Completed
  • Funding: $101691.00
  • Contract Numbers:

    49997-44-24

  • Sponsor Organizations:

    Research and Innovative Technology Administration

    Office of Research, Development, and Technology
    1200 New Jersey Avenue, SE
    Washington, DC    20590
  • Project Managers:

    Mooney, Deborah

  • Performing Organizations:

    University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez

    University of Puerto Rico - Mayaguez Campus
    Mayagüez, PR  United States  00681
  • Principal Investigators:

    Perdomo Rivera, José L.

    Valdés-Díaz, Dr. Didier M.

  • Start Date: 20121001
  • Expected Completion Date: 0
  • Actual Completion Date: 20140930
  • Source Data: RiP Project 33073

Subject/Index Terms

Filing Info

  • Accession Number: 01492471
  • Record Type: Research project
  • Source Agency: University Transportation Research Center
  • Contract Numbers: 49997-44-24
  • Files: UTC, RIP
  • Created Date: Sep 10 2013 1:00AM