Safety and cost considerations in site layout planning

Abstract EN

Planning construction site layouts involves identifying, sizing and positioning of temporary facilities on site, and accordingly it has a significant impact on the safety and efficiency of construction operation.

Although existing site layout planning models are capable of optimizing travel costs of resources on site layouts, they do not consider safety as an important and independent objective in planning site layout.

This paper presents an enhanced site layout planning model that enables simultaneous optimization of construction safety and travel and travel cost of resources.

The model integrates two recently developed safety performance criteria that are designed to improve the safety of crane operation, and enhance the control of hazardous material on site.

The optimization model is designed to consider all relevant decision variables, optimization objectives and practical constraints in this site layout problem, and is implemented using a multi-objective genetic algorithm.

As such, the developed model enables construction planners to search for and identify optimal location of all temporary facilities on site in order to minimize construction safety and cost simultaneously.

These new capability should prove useful to construction planners and can lead to significant improvements in the safety of construction operations and the cost of constructed facilities.