Abstract
Bulk materials are necessary for hydropower construction. The bulk materials transportation (BMT) scheme is a guiding document for material supply, and its selection has a significant influence on hydropower construction. Since the BMT problem includes transportation planning and scheme selection issues simultaneously, only a small number of studies have focused on it. This paper presents a theoretical two-stage decision-making method (TDM), which innovatively combines the path optimization method and the multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method to solve the BMT problem. In the first stage, a multi-source path optimization model is established to optimize the transportation network and obtain a set of alternatives from each supply point to the construction site. In the second stage, considering the factors of economy, risk and construction progress, the MCDM method is adopted to select the optimal scheme from the alternatives. In addition, web crawler technology is used to obtain the transportation network data from the public WebGIS automatically. Case results show that the TDM can effectively solve this problem, and its result keeps consistent with engineering practice; with the help of the web crawler, it can reduce the design task time from months to days. Therefore, the TDM based on WebGIS can benefit hydropower construction design efficiency.
Highlights
Renewable energy is currently the hotspot of international energy development and will gradually become the world’s primary energy source in the future [1,2]
The two-stage decision-making method (TDM) contains two stages: in the first stage, the multi-source path optimization (MSPO) model is established with the investment as the optimization objective, and the Floyd algorithm is used to solve the optimization model and get a set of alternatives instead of a manual solution; in the second stage, the investment, the transportation risks and transportation duration are selected as the decision objectives, the multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) model is established for the three objectives and the weighted TOPSIS method is adopted to rank alternatives and select the optimal scheme
According to the case profile, there are three cement suppliers in the transportation network, and every supplier corresponds to a transportation scheme that can transport the cement to the construction site with their minimum investment
Summary
Renewable energy is currently the hotspot of international energy development and will gradually become the world’s primary energy source in the future [1,2]. Hydropower construction generally consumes large amounts of building materials. Those construction materials can be logically grouped into two major categories: (1) materials fabricated on the construction site, such as sand–gravel aggregate; (2) materials fabricated or further processed off-site and that need to be transported from outside the construction site, such as cement, fly ash and steel—this category is named the bulk materials in this paper [5]. The BMT scheme is closely related to project investment, construction progress and engineering quality. There is no systematic and reliable theoretical model for the BMT problem. It is essential to carry out relevant research on the BMT problem in hydropower projects
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