Development of a Real-Time Fuel Monitoring System for Construction Industry using Internet of Things

Abstract

Construction companies are, today, beset by numerous challenging issues in trying to carry out civil engineering projects to support growing urban populations around the world. Construction companies and contractors in civil engineering domain rely on heavy construction vehicles and mobile equipment that rely on internal combustion engines that consume copious volumes of fossil fuels in the form of diesel fuel. The price of diesel fuel combined with humongous volumes required to keep heavy construction vehicles as well as transport vehicles in operation, therefore, puts a considerable strain on the resources of a construction firm engaged in construction project requiring extensive resources in the form of both human, equipment, vehicular and machinery. Without an appropriate tracking mechanism to monitor fuel consumption of vehicles such as transit mixers operating at construction site, a construction firm can quickly run up huge fuel bills leading to operational and financial losses in both short- and long-run. Using Internet-of-Things (IoT), collection of fuel monitoring data followed by real-time analyses at a centralized location, construction companies can easily track movements of construction vehicles embedded with sensor devices. In this paper, we propose a new system that is based on a capacitive sensor that is open source, coupled to a controller embedded in a construction equipment vehicle. The function of the controller would be to provide global positioning data over GPRS radio module for data transfer from almost any remote location.