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Material transportation problems in construction projects under an uncertain environment

  • Transportation Engineering
  • Published:
KSCE Journal of Civil Engineering Aims and scope

Abstract

Uncertainty is prevalent and unavoidable in business operations. This paper presents a mathematical model for the optimal routing of shipping raw materials to customers that requires simultaneous pickup and delivery with soft time windows for travel time in a fuzzy random environment. It minimizes total traveling time while maximizing customer satisfaction and meeting constraints characterized by fuzziness and randomness in pickup and travel time. The model is strong NP-hard. Through embedding of customer satisfaction as a constraint and converting fuzzy random variables into deterministic ones using expected values, a viable algorithm is developed using the Global-Local-Neighbor Particle Swarm Optimization (GLNPSO) technique, and tested by solving a real routing problem faced by a large construction project in China. Results are encouraging, both in solution quality and potential savings, to justify the solution method and model formulation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Management, Chongqing Jiaotong University, Chongqing, 40074, China

    Fang Yan

  2. Uncertainty Decision-Making Laboratory, Sichuan University, Chengdu, 610064, China

    Fang Yan & Jiuping Xu

  3. State Key Laboratory of Hydraulics and Mountain River Engineering, Sichuan University, Chengdu, 610064, China

    Jiuping Xu

  4. Department of Business Information Systems, Haworth College of Business, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI, 49008, USA

    Bernard T. Han

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  1. Fang Yan
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  2. Jiuping Xu
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  3. Bernard T. Han
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Correspondence to Jiuping Xu.

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Yan, F., Xu, J. & Han, B.T. Material transportation problems in construction projects under an uncertain environment. KSCE J Civ Eng 19, 2240–2251 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12205-015-0204-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12205-015-0204-8

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