SUSTAINABLE COST OPTIMIZATION OF MULTI SPAN BRIDGES AND FLYOVERS

Abstract

India is a fast developing nation in with a lot of construction activities in the infrastructure developments including roads railways and public utilities etc. Bridges and flyovers are the integral part of the roads and railways for the connectivity and ease of traffic. The history of the construction of concrete bridges in India is century old. In the case of construction of pre stressed concrete bridges also India has got a prominent role. In older days technology was not much developed and manual means were much implemented for the construction of bridges. Nowadays construction methodologies have been changed widely and sophisticated machineries are introduced which made the labour input to a minimum. But the overall construction cost is on the high. The main reason for the high overall construction cost is the lack of study at the planning stage. Subsequently all the flaws are cumulated and resulted in the high construction cost. This can be reduced to a great extent by implementing optimization techniques particularly in the planning and design stages. As far as a particular bridge site is concerned the unit cost of material, labour and machinery etc. are constant. So the cost effectiveness can only be achieved by the optimization of the design in consideration with the site related parameters. In this study the various factors which influence the higher cost of construction are elaborated and a real time approach to reduce the overall construction cost are discussed with. Apart from the cost considerations this will be particularly beneficial to the sustainable development by the minimum use of materials and energy thus preserving the ecology and environment to a possible extent. From this study it is inferred that the overall construction cost can only be achieved by utilizing the piles at its maximum capacity and the span length should be decided based on the various combinations of number of piles in a group.