Optimization Techniques Applied to Earthmoving and Highway Construction: a Survey

Abstract

Some studies claim that for overall savings in construction, planners should develop a strategy to optimize the cost of construction. In earthworks to highway construction, there are some ways to accomplish this using specific optimization techniques, such as minimizing the total distance traveled by equipment, minimizing total costs, and minimizing the execution time in balance with resource utilization. Mathematical programming is emphasized because it enables the development of important tools to minimize time, effort, and decision making, with the proven ability to determine optimal or near-optimal solutions. This paper presents a review of previous studies that employed optimization techniques to solve problems associated with earthmoving and highway construction. The review is organized around optimization techniques with the objective of optimizing cost and time through the efficient use of constrained and unconstrained resources. From the area of operations research, we can apply three principal techniques to solve earthmoving problem: transportation, scheduling, and routing. The article also provides an overview of this research area and its potential for practical use and discusses gaps that need to be filled in future studies. Many studies and papers have focused on mathematical optimization, but few have been applied in real-world projects and few have been designed to interface with commercially available software. Therefore, the practical application of such tools is still limited.
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