| Site development in heavy and civil construction need to consider many rules such as ensuring proper drainage, prevention of flood, safety driving, optimizing earthwork, minimizing fleet travel distances, proper fleet matching and achieving high equipment utilization rates. In recent decades, numeral researchers have presented different solutions to improve this process; however they have been either too complicated to be practical or oversimplify the problem definition by ignoring critical facts. This thesis presents three advanced quantitative techniques to enhance current earthwork construction practices including: a modification of least squares method to optimize the earthwork, an application of transportation simplex method to minimize the fleet travel distance, and an earthwork construction process simulation to ensure the accuracy of earthwork operations analysis. The thesis also includes an actual case study to demonstrate the practicality and effectiveness of the proposed methodology. |
