Effective site management and access control are useful aspects to implement at the construction industry. In particular, monitoring personnel, construction materials, and equipment is considered predominant elements at these sites as they constitute more than half of the total project cost. Thus, to provide accurate and timely information of man/materials, UHF-RFID technology integrated with Middleware acts as a pioneering solution for real-time data monitoring. This work develops a new approach to implement the Automatic Identification and Data Capture (AIDC) solution through Middleware integrated with the UHF-RFID system. To design a UHF RFID tag, we propose a new platform tolerant Artificial Magnetic Surface (AMC) meta surface integrated tag for tracking man/material at the construction site. The novelties of the proposed tag lie in its improved radiation characteristics and stable high read range performance on different items. The designed tag was fabricated and tested experimentally in a real outdoor scenario by placing it on different items such as personnel and metal objects. At the same time, we developed UHF-RFID system integrated Web application through Middleware to provide digital worksite visibility for access control and on/off-site management. Thus, the developed system will act as an automated tool to remotely fetch the information from different working zones at the construction site.

In this research, a circularly polarized antenna employing fractal slot geometry is proposed for UHF-RFID handset reader application. The proposed antenna consists of vicsekcross-shaped slot etched at diagonal axis to achieve circular polarization with a coaxial feed placed 45∘ with respect to the slot. The evolution of Vicsekcross shaped fractal slot is developed in different iteration stages for achieving wide impedance bandwidth covering U.S. UHF-RFID band with good axial ratio bandwidth performance. The single slotted reader antenna was investigated first followed by multi-slot antenna for size miniaturization, impedance bandwidth and axial ratio bandwidth performance. The impedance bandwidth and axial ratio bandwidth of the designed antenna were observed to be 25 MHz (903-927 MHz) and 7 MHz (911-917 MHz), respectively. Additionally, the designed antenna exhibited LHCP with a maximum measured gain of 2.9 dBic. The size of the final Vicsekcross-shaped four slot CP reader antenna is compact with dimensions of 57 x 57 x 1.6 mm.