Eco-economic excavator configuration method

Abstract

Excavating processes performed frequently in building, civil and infrastructure projects are critical and costly. To define a cost-effective excavator configuration, an earthwork planner depends mostly on experience and intuition. This intuitive reasoning is often error-prone, and highly experience based. This paper presents a computational method called the Eco-Economic Excavator Configuration (E3C), which selects the most favorable configuration of a heavy duty excavator according to the earthwork package and its job conditions. E3C obtains the input data from external databases, derives the formulae involved in computing the process performance (e.g., production rate, process completion time, and profit), and instructs the earthwork manager in the best-fit excavator configuration (e.g., maximum digging depth, engine size in HP, and bucket size) for profitable operation by considering the implicit constraints and conditions exhaustively. The method identifies the best-fit PDFs of the process completion time and that of the total profit, given an excavator configuration. A test case, which was performed at a building basement excavating project, confirmed the usability and validity of the method.