Soil Recycling Among Construction Sites by Optimizing Schedule and Costs for Earthmoving

Abstract

Recycling uncontaminated excavated construction soil is beneficial because it reduces the costs to abandon excess soil or obtain refill soil from a distant location while alleviating environmental burdens. For this reason, various methods and techniques to support on-site soil reuse have been explored. However, in order to increase the reuse rate, excavated soil should be recycled among different construction sites as well. As a prerequisite for reusing excess soil in this context, the construction schedules, type of soil, trading volume, and incurred costs must be coordinated. In order to consider all of these aspects, earthmoving among construction sites needs to be planned by means of multi-objective optimization. This paper aims to present a practical solution supporting inter-site soil trade by introducing a non-dominated sorting algorithm-II (NSGA-II), a type of multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (MOEA). A description of the optimization procedure is provided, and computational results are presented to prove the effectiveness of the selected method.

A Comprehensive Review on NSGA-II for Multi-Objective Combinatorial Optimization Problems

“…selection [183], resource scheduling in fog computing [184], inter-site earthmoving optimization [185], process planning and scheduling [186], [187], [188], cross-trained workers scheduling [189], cross-docking scheduling [190], workforce scheduling problem [191], multi-objective optimized operation of integrated energy system with hydrogen storage [192] and multi-objective integrated optimization of configuration generation and scheduling [193].…”

“…In [185], NSGA-II was used to plan the inter-site earthmoving in which it deals with two conflicting objectives of minimizing earthmoving costs associated with cut and fill sites along with satisfactory construction schedules.…”

Feasibility for the Recovery of Excavated Soils in Compressed Earth Blocks as a Sustainable Building Material

“…Nearly 45 million tons of are to be excavated from the Grand Paris Express project (Paris, France) alone [3] Excavated soil storage in stockpiles on land sites is costly. Furthermore, increasing distance from the storage site makes the operation uneconomical due to transportation costs [4]. Excavated soil reuse is complex due to its heterogeneous nature and because of the difficulty to treat all the soils with a similar approach due to variations in soil characteristics when compared with recycling inert waste from concrete, roads, bricks, etc.…”