Cloud-based fleet management for prefabrication transportation

Prefabricated construction heavily relies on the effective transportation of precast components, and efficient prefabrication transportation can benefit the whole construction process from many aspects, such as saving cost, time, and spaces. However, current practices of prefabrication transportation are inefficient due to various involved stakeholders, outdated decision support tools, scarce real-time data, and ineffective information sharing mechanisms. To tackle these problems, and facilitate the management and operations of prefabrication transportation, this paper proposes a cloud-based fleet management platform through integrating the advantages of Internet of Things (iot) and cloud technology. A Transportation Management Service Sharing (TMSS) mechanism is proposed, which enables the platform to be easily and economically used by various transportation service providers, and could benefit all the other stakeholders involved. Besides, relation-based data extraction approach is proposed to extract sufficient transportation data during the whole process, and the transportation data synchronization mechanism is also worked out to ensure the data consistency. Finally, based on a real-life prefabricated construction project for public housing production in Hong Kong, a case study is conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed platform.