Monitoring road base course construction progress by photogrammetry-based 3D reconstruction

Abstract

Infrastructure industry is a significant contributor to a country's economy, but it is beset by cost overruns and delays. Therefore, project monitoring is essential to determine project performance by comparing the site progress to the schedule baseline. However, manual tracking lacks the precision and efficiency. The ability to quickly and accurately identify differences is important to implement essential measures to reduce the impact of delays. This paper aims to build a technology-assisted progress monitoring framework for road base course construction. A case study is carried out on a road construction site using an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle to capture as-built data in a timely manner. Photogrammetry is used to generate point cloud model as the 3 D geometrical representative of the site. Percentage of Completion is computed as an indication for the progress of the construction along with the location of the work performed and the quantity of the material used. The framework produced a detailed and accurate construction progress report with evidence support from point cloud data which allows the visualization of the actual construction site in three dimensions. The findings reveal that the framework enables accurate and efficient tracking of road base course construction progress as well as schedule comparison.

Keywords:

• Photogrammetry
• UAV
• point cloud
• progress monitoring
• road base course construction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work is financially supported by the XJTLU doctoral scholarships (RDF-16-01-24), and 2020 Jiangsu Science and Technology General Programmes (BK20201191).