Recent advances in Automation In Construction are conceiving the ‘construction site of the future’ as a smart working place, where context-aware and self-adapting sensor networks and decision support systems monitor and complement in real time the activities of workers involved at every level: from labour to quality inspectors and field managers.
From the H&S perspective, smart working places are intended to acting in advance in dealing with expected difficulties, implementing a proactive, anticipatory approach to H&S control and mitigation. In addition, H&S and productivity of the construction industry can be improved by the adoption of robotized production machines.
As the current practice of manual collection of data for site management is expensive and rather inaccurate, automated data collection for project performance control, would enable construction activities to be efficiently managed and in a real-time. Hence, new automated data collection technologies are under development and regularly tested in real construction sites.