Designing of a Planning and Scheduling Tool for Earth Moving Operation

Abstract

The main objective of this study was to generate a tool for planning earth moving operations logistics. Each project has a different distance, maximum work period, and soil volume, also, the company’s soil transportation main restraint was the limited resources which could only provide a total of 2,100 trips available per month for all the ongoing projects. If the total trips of earth moving each month exceeds the available resource limit of the company, the company will use a more cost consuming outsource service. The researcher applied the theory of linear programming to solve the problem of the operation planning. Company’s data for 16 projects over a 2-years working period were used to create a mathematical model and the most efficient planning strategy were assessed through excel solver. The model has shown that it is possible to reduce the total project duration by 2 months and the total cost of logistics by 1.44 percent or 3,319,517 baht.