A Decision Support System for Earthwork Activities in Construction Logistics

Making decisions in a complex system such as the construction of a
highway is a hard task that involves a combinatorial set of possibilities, concerning
thousands of interrelated activities and resources over several years. In this paper
we describe a decision support system (DSS) developed to assist project managers
in decision making for the construction of the Autostrada Pedemontana Lombarda
highway, in Italy. The considered problem evaluates the earthwork activities in de-
tail and defines the minimum cost earthwork plan satisfying all constraints. The
proposed DSS involves the use of linear programming to solve the earthwork pro-
blem in a two-phase approach: in the first phase, an aggregate model determines the
feasibility of the overall project, whereas in the second phase, disaggregate models
determine the actual flows of each material. The DSS gathers the needed informa-
tion directly from the master plan commonly used by the company and provides
as output a set of visual solutions. The solution are yielded in short times and can
be run many times with different data sets supporting a fast evaluation of different
decisions. The provided solutions are also optimized and could substitute the previ-
ous manual results. The DSS has been proved to be very effective for assisting the
project managers of the above highway construction and is currently in use in other
projects