SCRAPER EARTH-MOVING FLEET OPTIMIZATION VIA SPREADSHEET-BASED MODELING

Earth-moving operation has a great impact on the overall budget and schedule of any heavy civil projects. More often than not, the operational decisions are made largely based on field personnel's experience and judgment. In particular, decisions on earth moving operations by scraper-dozer fleets have been heavily influenced by the following belief: "The longer a dozer pushes a scraper for loading, the better earth-moving productivity is gained by the fleet." Even though there is some truth to this notion, scraper-dozer earth moving operations involve a much complex process that requires a systematic analysis for predicting the maximum production. To this end, this paper presents a spreadsheet-based scraper-dozer fleet operation model for its production optimization. Various optimization techniques, including a genetic-algorithm method, are presented for comparison and each technique's pros and cons are discussed.