Safety and digitalization have emerged as key issues for the construction industry since the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Experts claim that digital twin technology can ensure construction safety and achieve increased productivity.

The 'Smart-Con Conference' was held at the 'Smart Construction Safety Industry Exhibition' held at KINTEX from the 16th to the 19th, providing a venue to share the latest smart construction site application cases and achievements.

Speakers including Dropbox, LG Uplus, Angelswing, Meisa, Bentley Systems, Safeware, Hoban Group, Easy Automation Technology, and Spanner shared key smart construction technologies such as digital twins, data, platforms, AI, construction automation, and construction safety.

In the announcement, LG Uplus's Myung-Noh Sung claimed, "LG Uplus can help prevent unsafe behaviors and eliminate risk factors among construction site workers with a smartphone-based smart safety solution developed for cost efficiency."

Regarding the background of the app installation, Myung explained that it was decided to support smartphone-based LTE and 5G communications due to issues such as costs and operations that arise when installing communications networks at construction sites.

Construction sites have a high proportion of shadow areas where communication is not possible, depending on the environment. When installed in such areas, there are disadvantages such as high communication costs, difficulty in managing equipment, and uncertainty about the possibility of meeting market demand.

LG U+'s smart safety equipment solution is a solution that can monitor the safety equipment fastening rate of individuals and companies in real time using machine learning sensors, thereby preventing unsafe actions by workers. In areas where app-based communication is not possible, the sensor stores data on a smartphone, and in areas where communication is possible, real-time transmission is possible.

“By introducing a smartphone app-based IoT solution, we are able to reduce costs, increase durability, and simplify the UI, providing easy wearability,” said Myung.

■ Digital Twin Ensures Safety at Construction Sites Angel Swing CEO Won-nyeong Park claimed in the presentation that “digital twin technology has improved productivity by enabling on-site workflow construction management, status surveying and earthwork volume calculation, and safety work management.”

Digital twin technology, which digitally implements construction sites based on data captured and recorded by drones, not only facilitates work but also ensures the safety of workers.

Workers can easily obtain cross-sectional data through the platform without having to directly measure, and can also roughly calculate the amount of earthwork through data linkage.

Angel Swing considered both HW and SW aspects to secure the accuracy of drone surveying results with several construction company surveyors. He explained how to secure accuracy by using a drone equipped with a mechanical shutter, installing an appropriate algorithm, and minimizing errors caused by loss of reference points.

Park also said, "Smart construction technology is evolving into automation, such as services that automatically calculate tolerances," and "We can support smarter construction sites by developing AI and computer vision-based automated detection technology."
Meisa CPO Park Jun-woo said, “We can overcome limitations and implement digital twins based on diversification of data collection channels, data quantification technology, and data optimization and lightweight technology.”

The inherent limitations that exist from a spatial, temporal, and human perspective increase costs. To overcome this, a digital world that is ‘quantified’ in ‘real time’ has emerged as a solution.

“To achieve digital twins, we must overcome three major hurdles: the diversity of objects, the irregularity of data, and its massive volume,” explained CPO Park.

Meisa's digital twin platform can overlap multi-channel collection data, and drones reduce the difficulty of collection through automation. Additionally, unstructured data collected as 2D images are processed and analyzed to be converted into 3D models.

Lastly, we shared data structuring technology to efficiently store and manage large-capacity spatial data centered on images and videos for data optimization and lightweighting, as well as computational optimization technology to increase the speed of spatial data creation and utilization.

Meanwhile, this year's 'Smart Construction Safety Industry Exhibition' focused on the latest smart technologies applied to actual construction sites, and solutions for ensuring safety and establishing safety systems at construction sites were exhibited. Safety solutions and equipment such as smart construction safety systems that utilize the latest technologies such as robots, drones, AI, and metaverse in industrial sites, and smart wearable devices that can be worn directly were also exhibited.

The exhibition held at KINTEX from the 16th to the 19th this year was centered around 'Korea Build', 'Smart Construction Safety Industry Exhibition', 'Modular & PC Industry Exhibition', and 'Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure Industry Exhibition'.