Developing an efficient algorithm for balancing mass-haul diagrams
Order Description
Read the paper “Developing an efficient algorithm for balancing mass-haul diagrams” and write a 3/4-page summary of paper. The font should be 10 Arial and single-spaced. Please do not include diagrams
Developing an ef ficient algorithm for balancing mass-haul diagrams
Khaled Nassar
a,
? , Ebrahim A. Aly
a
, Hesham Osman
b
a
Department of Construction and Architectural Engineering, the American University in Cairo, Egypt
b
Department of Civil Engineering, Cairo University, Egypt
abstract article i nfo
Article history:
Accepted 1 May 2011
Available online 31 May 2011
Keywords:
Mass haul diagrams
Line of balance
Earthwork
Planning
Construction
Road construction
Earth moving
Equipment
A number of linear and integer programming techniques have been used to minimize the total cost of
earthwork by considerin g the various factors involved in the process. Although these models often ensure a
global optimum for the problem, they required sophisticated formulations and are quite involved in their
setup and de fi nition as well as being expensive computationally and therefore may be of limited use in real
life. In construction practice, Mass-haul diagrams (MD) have been an essential tool for planning earthwork
construction for many applications including roadwork, piping, and other linear infrastructure facilities. One
of the most common heuristics that is used wide ly by practicing engineers in thefi eld to balance the MD is the
“shortest-haul- fi rst” strategy. Balancing the MD using this heuristic is usually carried out either graphically on
the drawing, or manually by comput ing values from the m ass-haul diagram itself. However performing this
approach graphi cally or manually is fairly tedious and time consuming. In addition manual and graphical
approaches are prone to error. More importantly, if the project considered has a large number of stations (in
the order of hundreds), then performing this balance manually becomes impractical. A robust algorithm is
therefore needed that can automatically balance the MD. The research discussed here presents a formal
defi nition of an algorithm that uses a sequential pruning technique for autom atically computing balances of
mass-haul diagrams. It is sho wn that the new algorithm is more effi cient than existing integer programming
techniques and computationally runs in level of complexity of O(log n) time in most cases. Thus this algorithm
can handle problem s with a large number of stations within a reasonable amount of time . In addition, a
computer implementation and extensive computational experiments are provided. Sugge stions for how this
algorithm can be used in cost-based or grade-based optimizatio n of hauling distances and quantities are
discussed.
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