A decision support system for material routing in construction sites

Predicting and selecting the route of materials movement within the site was identified to be an important consideration in the construction materials management. Important supportive decisions for selecting the route of materials movement on site are influenced by factors such as site layout and facilities positions, construction schedules and sequence, site accessibility and uncertainties. In this study, a framework of VCMR (Virtual Construction Material Router) to select the most suitable route of material movement was conducted, the limitations of the current methods were identified, and the requirements of an innovative tool were determined. Concepts from the areas of information capture (representation), site related reasoning and fuzzy intelligence are established to be applicable for selecting the route of materials movement. The decision support system for selecting the route of materials was developed using the fuzzy logic system-fuzzyTECH, geographic information system-AutoCAD® Map and custom programs (i.e. , VB 6.0 and MS Access). The primary features of the system are: (i) integration of site reasoning and factors such as site attributes, layouts and schedule with geometry; (ii) user friendly interface that is used to carry out decision making analysis; and (iii) visualisation of the most suitable route of materials movement in a 2D graphic format. Two ongoing construction project sites were used to validate the prototype version of the system for applicability and sensibility. The primary conclusions drawn from this research are: (i) the GISfuzzy approach is an innovative method for modelling and generating solutions to the path planning problems (ii) GIS-fuzzy is a powerful technology, which can be applied to other construction site management issues.