Routing large vehicles on industrial construction sites

This paper describes the development of a prototype system for planning access routes for large vehicles within an industrial construction site. Access planning is an important consideration in the development of an effective project-execution plan. But conventional planning tools do not facilitate effective planning. The primary objectives of this work are to define a structured process for planning access and to automate the tedious and difficult tasks within the process. Concepts from the areas of information representation, geometric reasoning, and artificial intelligence are found to be applicable for automating route-planning tasks. The implementation of these concepts to develop the route-planning system is achieved by using the expert system Nexpert Object and the geographic information system Arc/Info in conjunction with the computer-aided design (CAD) package Microstation, the spreadsheet Excel, and custom programs.