Contract For Student Project in ESM5984

Project Investigators:

Colin McComb ( colin@clark.ce.vt.edu )

Sailesh Ramakrishnan ( sailesh@clark.ce.vt.edu )

Title: Development of a Construction Equipment Management System

Background

This project was conceived with the help of Dr. Michael Vorster. Dr. Vorster has done extensive work with construction equipment management. This project will be the culmination of numerous meetings with Dr. Vorster for insight and advice on how a better system for construction equipment management could help the construction industry. The project intends to determine the best way to show the information pertaining to equipment conditions, and as an end result the project will develop a construction equipment management system for use in the industry.

Progress

The investigators have been supplied with a vast amount of usable data pertaining to various types of construction equipment. Through a joint effort with Dr. Vorster, the criteria for determining the condition of equipment has been determined. Condition of equipment shall contain the variables: age, cost & reliability. The investigators have also made educated guesses on the best ways to present information based on Tufte's principles of data visualization. A continuation of research in these areas will pursue and the investigators will begin testing the various formats for presenting construction equipment condition information in the near future.

Objectives

The project has three main objectives. The first of these involves the determination of the best format for presentation of the data that we have been supplied. The next two objectives of the project will be the bulk of the project. First, the system will enable the user to determine the condition of any individual piece of equipment in terms of age cost and reliability and it will also allow him/her to access past records pertaining to the condition of that piece of equipment. Secondly, the system will enable the user to compare the condition of one piece of equipment to all other similar pieces of equipment throughout the fleet.

Tools

Based on the task of choosing a suitable format for presentation, the investigators feel that finding the correct tools for presentation is part of our objective.