Optimized earthwork planning methodology for land development projects

Abstract

An earthwork for land development projects, which possesses around 20% of the total project cost, consists mainly of simply repetitive tasks such as loading, hauling, dumping, and returning and depends largely on heavy construction machines. The goal of earthwork planning is to minimize the project cost and duration by determining soil allocation, equipment configuration, and haul route. Due to the absence of programs or guidelines for earthwork planning, planners rely heavily on their experiences for planning. Subjective decisions can cause problems such as repetitive works, difficulties in finding solutions, and considerable working time. This paper presents the earthwork planning model using Simulated Annealing algorithm which is a stochastic optimization algorithm. Interviews with planners were conducted to investigate current earthwork planning process and planners' heuristics. It is found that the objective of earthwork planning is to minimize earthwork cost by balancing soil volume and minimizing hauling distance. In order to reflect collected planners' rules of thumb, three objective functions (balancing cut-fill volume, compactness, and constructability) were framed and case study was conducted to verify the applicability of the proposed model.