The Internet of Things is not an imaginative concept anymore. As we move forward with IoT, we are about to enter the next phase of the Industrial Age where computers won’t be considered as separate things. People are already expecting their surrounding objects to provide a ton of data regarding the productivity, performance, energy consumption, and maintenance of those connected things. So, when a machine breaks down or an entity hits its threshold, they’ll wonder why they didn’t get a heads-up.
Now that the potential of IoT is known to the world, it’s not just developers whose eyes brighten whenever they hear about IoT. According to the United Nations, over 65% of the world’s population will be residing in urban areas by the end of 2050. Considering this, Azure IoT Suite has drawn major attention of city planners, construction companies, and real-estate industry.
Azure IoT Suite to gain real-time details of the construction operation and processes, in addition to providing efficiency reports of machines and workers. With the help of M2M connectivity, construction companies can minimize the time consumed in the processes and reduce the overall cost associated with them. A connected process will provide more insights on workers’ safety and take informed decisions on construction management.
Some of the ways in which construction companies can benefit from Azure IoT Suite are:
Construction equipment tracking
Azure IoT Hub will allow the managers to keep a count of construction tools and provide details on where each of the equipment is currently located. They will be able to tell how many excavators or pneumatic drills are present at a given location and make better utilization of available resources. This will reduce the time consumed in looking for misplaced tools and also minimize the cost involved with the replacement of the missing equipment.
Remote monitoring and operation
The connected devices provide data that allows companies to know which tools are used by workers and ensures that the construction hours are logged automatically. Machine performance and threshold limits can be monitored to prevent mishaps and sudden breakdowns. Gaining actionable insights from all the collected data can be made possible with Azure Stream Analytics, which seamlessly integrates with Azure IoT Suite and Azure IoT Hub to provide real-time data analytics. Once the machines are connected to a network, managers can also provide instructions to them remotely. Such machines can then be used in locations that are not suitable or are unsafe for humans.
Fuel and power savings
When all the tools are connected, construction managers can receive real-time information on the amount of power used by each of them. They can also adjust the after-hours lighting accordingly for energy conservation. Construction equipment can send details on idling time so as to allow on and off adjustments to save fuel and time, which is required to restart them. With the use of Azure Machine Learning, prediction on the usage of fuel and energy can be done to further save the involved cost.
On-job safety
With Azure IoT, all the workers at the construction site are connected and can be tracked at the room level, allowing the companies to have an exact idea of which operations are under process and to keep track of daily labor hours. In case of an emergency situation, the general contractor can have a precise system in place that can let him know how many workers have been able to evacuate successfully or if any of the workers need help. Room level tracking warrants workers’ safety on a construction site and can make the work of emergency responders much easier.
Coming to the real-estate industry, realtors have their eye on the Internet of Things to make connected buildings and make management easier for tenants and building superintendents. Real-estate can adopt IoT to transform the way the industry works, to cope with evolving customer demands and preferences.
Here’s a rundown of a few Azure IoT Suite use cases for real-estate:
Green building
The green building movement gave rise to sustainable construction and architecture, and it has been influencing the engineering and design of the buildings and structures. Green buildings will be capable of managing and conserving energy by automatically shutting down the unnecessary systems according to the movement and occupancy of the area. IoT will make energy management and building management easier and quicker than ever before.
Building Information Modeling (BIM)
Once the building is up and occupied, IoT sensors can be used to get information on how the building is affected by climate changes, get reports on energy usage and movement throughout the building. It can also gather details on how structures are affected with the passage of time, how a bridge is affected by the weight of the passing vehicles or how a building is affected in case of earth tremors. Thus, BIM provides a great deal of data, which can be further utilized to improve building operations.
Are your ready to make informed decisions with Azure IoT Suite?
Azure IoT Suite can be implemented to your next construction project, providing you with a bunch of real-time insights, which were previously hidden under the pile of unused data. If you would like to leverage our Azure IoT development services for your business, get in touch with our Azure IoT consultants.
