The International Association for Automation and Robotics in Construction
Publications / 2011 Proceedings of the 28th ISARC, Seoul, Korea
Dynamic Site Layout Planning Using MTPE Principle from Physics
Site layout planning is the task of determining optimum location for construction facilities on the site in order to increase productivity and safety of the project. Most of the existing studies assume all facilities are required for the entire duration of the project which is not a realistic scenario. More advanced studies have proposed dynamic models to reflect the changes in the project requirements over the course of time. They generate optimum layouts for a set of consecutive time intervals. However, combining individually optimized layouts does not necessarily guarantee globally optimum locations for facilities. In addition, forcing facilities to fit in a set of predetermined time intervals can lead to waste of space and inefficient layouts. This research adopts the Minimum Total Potential Energy (MTPE) principle from physics to develop a dynamic planning model which generates layouts that are globally optimized. It assumes construction site to be a physical system in which construction facilities represent particles and the internal forces among particles reflect the closeness constraints between facilities. The total potential energy of the system represents the fitness of the layout for the defined objective function. Based on MTPE principle, the internal forces cause particle to search for a location with lower potential energy until the system reaches equilibrium. The final state of particles represents the minimum total potential energy of the system, which reflects the fittest arrangement for the facilities on the site. A computational example is analyzed to investigate the accuracy of the proposed model and demonstrate its capabilities.