, much of which was underpinned by a continuous flow of data across the design, manufacturing, assembly and operation phases.
Still, that’s primarily what we’re hearing about these days.In actual fact, what we really need are low-power devices to gather information about simple things.
We need to know where a particular machine is located, whether it’s vibrating, how noisy it is, and what the light and temperature readings are.. All of this information can be done on devices that are already in plentiful supply.All that’s needed is something like a LoRaWAN network to connect to.LoRaWAN is a long-range, wide-area network on a different frequency band to WiFi.
As a result, it doesn’t compete with cell phones and other devices connected via WiFi on construction sites.As LoRaWAN is very long-range, it enables construction sites to be quite remote, representing great potential for Australia where it’s not unusual to travel five to ten hours to a site.
Europe is already covered in LoRaWAN with something like 10,000 gateways across Europe, over 1,000 in Australia, and around 800 in the U.S. One barrier which presents for the latter, is that their cellular network, which runs across states, makes it difficult to talk between networks.
As such, we need to remove that network issue from IoT construction.But just as people no longer have their shoes tailor-made by a shoe maker, it’s time for the construction industry to embrace change and forge a new path toward progress.
As we stare down the barrel of a rapidly growing, global population and its associated infrastructure needs, alongside an aging construction workforce and a life-altering climate crisis, our current state of low productivity, non-transferable learnings, and high waste is no longer acceptable.. It’s these types of issues, and the associated risk, industrialised construction products and processes help to resolve.. Making the change with Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DfMA).The issue of productisation forms a key concept within the industry’s broader shift toward industrialised (or manufactured) construction.
However, implementing.modular and prefabricated building components along with a.