edge construction technology will become tomorrow essential technology Daily Commercial News<br><br>When you have 3,200 precast structural elements to be manufactured, transported and installed, and no laydown yard in which to store them until needed, you better be able to keep track of them.It not the sort of job an average contractor will ever undertake, but even on a smaller scale, contractors need to be able to keep track of the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle they building until they can be put in place.Skanska USA Building Inc., the American arm of the Swedishbased international giant, is the designbuilder leading construction of a new stadium being built in New Jersey Meadowlands area as a home for both the New York Giants and New York Jets of the National Football League.Faced with the complexity of the billiondollar project, plus a tight timeline that means having the project done and ready for the start of the 2010 NFL season, Skanska elected to use RFIDs, radio frequency identification tags, to keep track of things.The elements are precast risers that will form the bowl of the stadium. Although sizes and shapes vary somewhat, they average about 44 feet by 10 feet and weigh about 45,000 pounds. As they are placed within the stadium structural frame they become seating risers.Because the shapes vary somewhat, it not possible to substitute another riser if the one you want isn available.The risers are being cast at four plants, all within four hours of the construction site. Each is tagged with a $2 RFID tag at that point, and the tag is read by a pensized reader at every stage from then on from inspection and loading on to a truck to final placement.Because cheap nba jerseys wholesale there is no space to hold them on site, a justintime delivery system is used, which means for everything to go smoothly, every nextinline piece must arrive in the right order, and roll under the hook right on cue.Sounds somewhat complex when you doing it once. But it sounds even more complex when you realize that it has to cheap authentic nfl jerseys happen 3,200 times, which is the problem Skanska had to deal with.But there is a payoff. The company figures that it will gain at least 10 days on the schedule. The savings are expected to total about US$1 million.This is obviously a system that only for the big players in the industry. While there was some offtheshelf software used, there were also customwritten programs, and weeks of collaborative work.The result is a system that uses RFIDs to capture tag numbers on individual pieces as they move from manufacture to placement, while at the same time creating a fourdimensional structural design and construction sequence model. The old method was a system of spreadsheets and colourcoded drawings which worked, but was slower and couldn provide the sequence modelling the fourth dimension of time.Consequently, several companies and products were wholesale nba jerseys brought into the design of the new system, which combines elements from Architectural Desktop and Navisworks from Autodesk, Primavera System P3 scheduling software, and supplychain databases bringing together software from Vela Systems and Tekla Inc. The idea for all that came from another RFIDbased management system Skanska developed for one of its projects in Finland.Clearly, this is a oneoff system that is far, far beyond the reach of the local contractor whose annual work might consist of three or four jobs totalling maybe $50 million. But it clear that the use of RFIDs in construction is one of the ways of the future.As kinks are worked out, as software developers begin producing fully commercial products instead of prototypes that only the big firms can afford, we find eversmaller firms able to take advantage of the productivity gains things like RFID technology offer we can afford to ignore. Send comments to.
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