Soil Recycling Among Construction Sites by Optimizing Schedule and Costs for Earthmoving

Abstract

Recycling uncontaminated excavated construction soil is beneficial because it reduces the costs to abandon excess soil or obtain refill soil from a distant location while alleviating environmental burdens. For this reason, various methods and techniques to support on-site soil reuse have been explored. However, in order to increase the reuse rate, excavated soil should be recycled among different construction sites as well. As a prerequisite for reusing excess soil in this context, the construction schedules, type of soil, trading volume, and incurred costs must be coordinated. In order to consider all of these aspects, earthmoving among construction sites needs to be planned by means of multi-objective optimization. This paper aims to present a practical solution supporting inter-site soil trade by introducing a non-dominated sorting algorithm-II (NSGA-II), a type of multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (MOEA). A description of the optimization procedure is provided, and computational results are presented to prove the effectiveness of the selected method.