A simulation-based approach for optimal construction planning and scheduling

Project schedules in construction are responsible for an efficient deployment of resources on the job-site and for the overall efficiency of work progress. Current approaches too often lead towards sub-optimal work plans or, sometimes, even scarce productivity. For that reason, a lot of research was devoted to the development of automated scheduling tools, which can provide optimal solutions while requiring reasonable computational effort. As a consequence, planners can save their time and involved resources can benefit from the efficient organization of work packages and tasks. However, automation in construction scheduling is a tough challenge, because it requires to generate and optimize multi-objective problems, which usually include several parameters. In addition, deviations from what expected is quite frequent, and these algorithms should be able to quickly revise the previous plan, in fact performing dynamic planning. Hence, this paper presents an agent-based approach, which can be integrated in a BIM-based platform to perform automated scheduling of construction works. The BIM component can provide instant access to relevant information, which must be integrated with some user defined inputs, in order to feed the optimization algorithm. This algorithm was based on the multiple ant colony system for vehicle routing problems with time windows, because it can handle several resources travelling through many locations, each one performing its task, even in the presence of time constraints. The optimization was performed with respect to both overall makespan and total costs. An application to the case of bored piles execution will be presented in this paper.