Bar Coding in Construction Engineering

Abstract

Automated inventory control has been used for many years in such industries as manufacturing, automotive, and retail grocery. These industries have recognized technologies such as bar coding, magnetic stripe, optical character recognition, and radio frequency as viable solutions to the information and production control problems they encounter. This paper presents a construction information management system (CIMS) for the control of information used by project management. This system successfully transfers a resource identification and tracking (RIT) technology, namely bar coding, from a manufacturing environment to control data acquisition needs for construction. In addition, CIMS integrates scheduling, inventory, cost, and document control application programs with a central data base management system (DBMS) using stand‐alone software, a DBMS programming language, and a spreadsheet. An introduction to the objectives and unique contribution of CIMS is presented, along with a review of other related construction industry research. The information needs of construction engineering are reviewed to determine how a system such as CIMS can satisfy those needs. A generic system architecture is described, and an implementation of the architecture is presented.