Enhanced Tower Crane Operations in Construction Using Service Request Optimization

Tower cranes are one of the most important equipment in the construction sites, by the time passing the role of the tower cranes will be more significant. Tower cranes are among the most expensive machines. By enhancing the usage of tower cranes time and cost will be reduced, and the quality and safety will be improved. Everyday tower crane’s operator has a list of request from crews, he/she must take materials that they need from specific storage and carry them other location. Usually operator himself/herself decide which crew will get their material first which one is second and so on, and of course it is not the optimum sequence. Since that activity that related to tower crane are mostly on the critical path, if delay happens in these activities it will effect duration of the whole project. So by enhancing the service request sequence both time and cost will be reduced. In this study MATLAB R2013a software is used, and to find the optimum solution a Genetic Algorithm is coded. In this example 9 best solution were find within 50! Different alternative answers, so construction manager according to the situation can decide which service request should be used.