Abstract

Purpose: Today, the majority of decisions in construction production are made on

undefined data, which leads to large unnecessary resource consumption, mainly

during the casting process. It also leads to unpredictability in decision making in

production, which affects production control and thus costs, schedules and quality. A

major uncertainty characterizes the casting process today, reflecting the development

needs faced by the construction industry, which are cost-effective and time-efficient.

Nevertheless, the investment in digital data collection tools is low. Therefore, in this

work, opportunities are investigated for automatic data collection with one of the

latest digital trends, Internet of Things, to promote decision making during the casting

process.

Method: This work is carried out as a qualitative study. The data collection methods

consist of semi structured interviews together with production engineers, IoT

consultants and developers in the concrete industry. A literature study is also

conducted to build up the interview questions as well as the analysis of the results.

Findings: The analysis of the case study indicates that the company today lacks

structure in its work on data collection in construction production. Through the

interviews in production, it was found that, according to respondents, IoT is believed

to enable more quality-assured data collection and enable decisions to be made on

time. To achieve this, it requires the company to establish structures on how data

collection should be stored. Which previous studies show that IoT can be a good tool

for. The case study also shows that the need and interest for IoT systems at the

company is high. By collecting data using IoT sensors, knowledge transfer is believed

to contribute to decision making on data as a complement to experience.

Implications: It is necessary to create a culture within business so that more decisions

can be made on data instead of experience. Before implementation, a good level of

knowledge for ADC tools should be increased because interest in the area increases as

knowledge grows. When there is interest and need, a test project should be conducted

where decisions are made on real-time data.

Limitations: The work does not take into account cost aspects when implementing

ADC tools in the casting process. The report is based on a construction technology

perspective and thus does not describe the construction of digital tools in detail.

Keywords: ADC, construction industry, construction management, casting process,

Internet of things, attitude and knowledge.