Application Of GPS Fleet Tracking and Stochastic Simulation to a Lean Soil Excavation Practice

The unpredictable traffic condition around the construction site and the operator’s uneven productivity often make it difficult to rapidly identify an optimum combination among various excavation and hauling units in a soil excavation process. Construction professionals often end up increasing the number of vehicles to manage unpredictable risk, which obviously increases the project cost. Kaizen, which is a Japanese lean production tool for a repetitive process, may facilitate construction professionals to rapidly identify the optimum combination between excavation and hauling units. This paper presents our investigation to figure out whether the GPS fleet tracking technology integrated with a stochastic construction simulation could facilitate the application of the Kaizen strategy to the process of figuring out the optimum number of hauling units for a soil excavation process.