Underground construction projects operate under severe restrictions in terms of times and costs and require the use of a vast amount of equipment and operators during their development. Assuming that the number of actives owned by the companies is also limited, and that usually different works are running in parallel requiring the same assets at separate locations, a trustable control and management of the personnel, machinery and other necessary components is a crucial element to maintain and, if possible, increase the profitability of the projects.

In connection to that, the operation of the port terminals and the railway transport of goods (to a construction site or any other place) are performed separately and there is a lack of interoperability between their information and management models.

We propose to address the challenges with the following objectives:

  • To develop a cost-efficient solution to optimize the train traffic in underground construction sites, integrating advanced algorithms to improve rolling stock usage, robustness and service reliability, while maintaining safety conditions.

  • To develop a traceability solution based on wireless communication to be deployed in a port environment.

  • To develop a Fixed/Mobile Gateway that connects heterogeneous sensor networks to distributed (cloud-based) services and which allows monitoring and management of individual sensor islands

  • To develop a monitoring tool based on collected data on site as well as construction planning to infer potential security/safety problems on site. Both in traffic as well as on personnel.

  • To develop robust and incidence-tolerant multi-modal hub scheduling techniques, able to manage inherent stocks provisioning, operator allocation and inherent uncertainties to transportation such as unexpected interruption or cancelation of the service or delays, situation and traffic times’ variability, caused by different reasons: weather, breakdowns, among others.

  • To develop robust and incidence-tolerant multi-modal hub scheduling techniques, able to manage inherent stocks provisioning, operator allocation and inherent uncertainties to transportation: unexpected interruption or cancelation of the service or delays, situation and traffic times’ variability, caused all of them to different reasons: weather, breakdowns, among others.

  • To develop construction project performance assessment, prediction methods and planning using raw data from project management information, historic reports and real-time information from the transportation networks and site sensors.