Data Lifecycle Management in Smart Building using Wireless Sensors Networks
Kais Mekki, William Derigent, Eric Rondeau, André Thomas
Research Centre for Automatic Control of Nancy, CNRS UMR 7039, Campus Sciences, BP 70239,
Vandoeuvre-lès-Nancy Cedex, 54506, France.
{kais.mekki, william.derigent, eric.rondeau, andre.thomas}@univ-lorraine.fr
Abstract:
A new area is coming with communicating materials able to provide diverse functionalities to
users all along the product lifecycle, during the design, manufacturing, use and dismantling phases. These
materials can track their own evolution all along the product lifetime, gather helpful information and thus
allow information continuum at all time and everywhere. Usually, these functionalities are fulfilled via
the integration of specific electronic components into the material (wireless sensors nodes, RFID tags).
The present paper forms part of this framework in considering that thousands of micro-sensor nodes are
integrated into a precast concrete. Data management in the integrated sensor nodes requires Wireless
Sensor Network (WSN) protocols development. We recently developed a data storage protocol,
called
USEE, for communicating materials. To extract this information, we recently developed also a data
retrieval protocol, called RaWPG. In this paper, the performances of these protocols are evaluated on the
case study of the precast concrete lifecycle management.
Keywords:
Lifecycle Management, Smart Building, Wireless Sensors Networks, Data Storage/Retrieval.
1. INTRODUCTION
Concrete’s versatility, durability, and economy have made it
the world’s most used construction material. The concrete
construction companies mainly follow two strategies: i) Local
concrete fabrication: the concrete is produced on construction
site via formwork, the site is delivered only in raw material
(granula, cement, adjuvant, etc.) and scrap. ii) Precast
concrete fabrication: all construction elements (beams, floors,
bearing walls, pillars, etc.) are factory away from the site and
brought to the site to be implemented quickly.
For
reasons of cost and time, the choice is take up mostly
toward the precast concrete. Indeed, as it was described in
one of the four roles of construction management (Vrijhoef,
2000): We must transfer the activities of the earlier building
site in the chain. These avoid the climate change in the site
and conduct a number of parallel operations. With precast, it
is possible to improve the construction site in place, time and
quality. Actually as example, the United States uses about
260 million cubic meters of precast concrete each year. It is
used
in highways, streets, parking lots, parking garages,
bridges, high-rise buildings, dams, homes, floors, sidewalks,
driveways, and many other applications (Kosmatka et al.,
2003).
In recent years, a new research area has appeared for
improving precast concrete in logistic chain, traceability and
security using RFID and sensor nodes technology. In 2007,
BizzDev company (www.bizzdev.com) designed a system
composed of two parts: a temperature sensors node is directly
embedded in the precast and RFID tag in its surface. The
concrete is therefore able
to deliver its temperature
continuously over time for supervising application. Also,
CERIB company (www.cerib.com) on collaboration with the
“Research Centre for Automatic Control of Nancy” uses
RFID in the concrete for traceability in the supply chain
(Albin, 2014): concrete beams were instrumented by
integrating two RFID tags on each end. Then, CE
information has been stored in the memory of these tags,
increasing the chances that such information is not lost and
still available throughout the supply chain.
However, the idea used in these two examples consists in
integrating sensor nodes and RFID tags in some part of the
precast concrete. This could lead to two problems: i) If the
precast exceeds the human scale. It is common to
find some
buildings beams or concrete slabs of tens meters (even a
hundred meters). It is then difficult for the operator to
systematically go through all the building (over 100 meters
for example) to identify its characteristics or by searching for
the tags containing the information. ii) When the precast
concrete is used and installed inside the building, it is
difficult to localize and access to the RFID tags inside the
precast. iii) The RFID technologies are limited in memory,
thus using one or two tags could not allow large information
storage.
For
this reason, another applications aim to fully integrate
RFID tags in precast concrete to allow accessing information
from each part of building. In (Kalansuriya et al., 2013), the
RFID tags are placed uniformly in the surface of the precast
to take a first step towards automatic detection of cracks. The
cracks are detected when some tags are damaged. In
(Lafarge, 2013), Lafarge company (www.lafarge.com)
integrated RFID tags directly into the concrete for traceability
application. The RFID tags are disseminated in all the
building concrete at number of 4 or 5 tags every 2 m
3
on
average. The ID of tags could then be readied in each part of
the building. Using this ID, the operators could access to all
the needed information about the concrete (e.g. constructor,
date, technical characteristic, etc.) through an external
associated database.
The nature of both previous applications is limited. It is a
simple identification of RFID tags and a consultation of
concrete information from an external database.
In
this paper, we define new services for a potential