Characterize concrete demand in bored-pile construction through simulation

Abstract

This chapter aims to characterize the temporal demand of concrete on a bored-pile construction site by simulating the entire concreting operations on an ongoing railway station extension project in Hong Kong. The CYCLONE technology is used to illustrate the construction processes and the interaction of various resources in concreting a bored pile. Further, a newly developed simplified discrete-event simulation approach (SDESA) has been implemented to model the bored-pile processes aimed at predicting the arrival times of truckmixers to ensure continuous concrete supply and undisturbed site operations. The chapter provides results of a comparative analysis of CYCLONE model and the SDESA model. The results show that SDESA model is preferred over CYCLONE model for two reasons. First, simulating with SDESA does not require familiarity by the user with any software-specific terminology and modeling schematics as with CYCLONE. The process of building a SDESA model for complex construction operations is as simple as the CPM planning, thus allowing fast development of complicated models by common practitioners, which is in particular of significance to construction planning. Second, user outputs can be easily customized by running Access queries on simulation data, as the prototype of SDESA has been coded into a computer system using Microsoft Access, which is a relational database system with supporting VB macro programs.