OPTIMISATION OF CREW AND RESOURCE ALLOCATION IN READYMIX CONCRETE DELIVERY

Team: GEM Michael Smytheman 3185975 Gleb Zinger 3219727 Eric Luu 3207175

Submitted on 9 July 2011

Abstract
Townhouse type developments have returned to the favour of local planning offices in many suburban areas, and it is thus of high importance to optimise the foundation of construction - Ready Mix Concrete Pour Process. The objective of this paper was to study and optimise this particular operation in the construction project of Little Bay Terraces using computer simulation through AnyLogic. To achieve this objective, field data was collected on-site through recorded observations of the cycle and process times, and were then used to determine the optimum combination of resources of trucks and crew. Whilst being a labourintensive process, extensive idle time of both the pump and the spreading crew of up to 50% were observed, as well as redundant truck queues, placing unnecessary excess costs on the RMC pour process. The scheduling of the truckmixers inter-arrival time was not considered a variable for this particular process. The cost-effectiveness of the RMC pour process could be analysed by studying the impact of additional resources on the idle time and total time. Increasing the number of resources to 9 trucks and 2 crews saw an improvement of 122 minutes (33%) over the initial site observation of 6 trucks and 1 crew. Adequate utilisation of both the pump and the spreading crew was maintained and improved upon, resulting in an efficient and effective execution of the operation and a global cost reduction.

Contents
OPTIMISATION OF CREW AND RESOURCE ALLOCATION IN READYMIX CONCRETE DELIVERY...............................................................................................................1 Abstract.................................................................................................................2 Introduction...........................................................................................................4 Literature Review..................................................................................................5 Case Study.............................................................................................................6 Symbolic Modelling................................................................................................7 Data Collection......................................................................................................8 Model Development.............................................................................................10 Results Analysis...................................................................................................11 Conclusion...........................................................................................................13 Reference............................................................................................................14 Appendix A: Data Collection................................................................................15 Appendix A: Data Collection

ReadyMix Concrete Delivery

CVEN4104 Major Project

Introduction
Ready mixed concrete (RMC) placing is a major operation in many countries. This is particularly true in the city of Sydney where townhouse-type developments have regained its prominence in the inner west. Concrete must be batched remotely and delivered to construction sites by truckmixers and thus the productivity of RMC placing is of great importance to the productivity improvement of not just the housing construction industry, but the entire sector. With a more efficient and optimised process, costs incurred would be reduced proportionally, leading to a global cost reduction in the industry. The aim was to determine the optimum resource allocation of crews and equipment for RMC, and determine the best dispatch rate of trucks from the concrete mixing site to the work site. Past literature has concentrated on determining the optimum inter-arrival rate for trucks being dispatched. This will be looked at in this investigation, however this investigation will also look at the optimum number of spreader crews, and how the allocation of crews affects the overall performance of concrete delivery. This information is vital to construction engineers. Construction engineers need to know the correct interarrival rate to use, as this needs to match the number of concrete trucks arriving at the site with the speed at which the crews are able to pump and spread the concrete. If the inter-arrival rate is not accurately matched to the capacity of the crews this can result in excessive queuing of trucks on site, or idle crews.

ReadyMix Concrete Delivery

CVEN4104 Major Project

Literature Review
The productivity of RMC placing is of great importance to the productivity improvement of the whole construction industry and as such, there have been a number of previous researchers who have investigated this particular process. An appropriate and well-timed supply of RMC to a construction site was considered to be a major factor affecting productivity of concreting operations and that the RMC supplier should provide a continuous flow of concrete to ensure no interruptions to the placing and spreading operation. (Anson et al., 1996, 1998; Wang et al., 1995, 2000, 2001). This process has since been utilised and simulated via this ideology. (Wang, Teo, Ofori, 2001). From their simulation results, it was confirmed that the truckmixers arrival pattern is the most important factor in determining RMC placing productivity whilst ensuring a relatively high utilisation of the pump equipment. One of the main assumptions of their simulation was that the placing process was not considered a variable which was one of the major factors that we have analysed in our case study. In addition to the lack of variability of crew performance, their model also featured a queuing system with an infinite number of trucks which is not indicative of a real-life process where there would be a re-use of truckmixers. Their reasoning for this assumption was due to the relatively low placing rate on the construction site as well as the relatively large number of truckmixers at the batching plant which was not considered to generate significant errors. This is obviously a site-dependent issue with its own limitations. One of the focal points of our case study was the interaction of the pumping process and the spreader crews on the construction site. The observed high idle times for the crew as well as the extensive truck queues were suggestive of a low synchronisation of processes within the system. It was apparent that simply adjusting the inter-arrival times to match the RMC supply from the batch plant would not be adequate for this particular operation, and that an optimisation of the combination of trucks and spreader crews was a necessary endeavour in order to improve overall productivity as well as cost reduction.

ReadyMix Concrete Delivery

CVEN4104 Major Project

Case Study
A case study was undertaken at a construction site at the corner of Harvey Street and Brodie Avenue, Little Bay. The approximately property boundary is shown in the image below, where a new multistorey residential development is under construction on a land parcel with an area of approximately 10,300m 2. It is part of a new subdivision on the land where the old hospital once stood, and several construction projects are being undertaken in the area. The building was designed by Bates Smart Architects and constructed by Brookfield Multiplex.

ReadyMix Concrete Delivery

CVEN4104 Major Project

Construction of the building commenced in November 2010, and is due to be completed early 2012. Observations of the construction process were made on Friday 8th April 2011. At the time the site had been excavated and prepared for the first major concrete pour of the ground slab. The process of pouring the concrete was observed and data collected using a logbook. The total volume of concrete poured was 145m3. Holcim was the company delivering the concrete from Alexandria, and there were 6 trucks used in the process. On arrival at the site the trucks queued up until there was a free space at the concrete pump. The concrete pump had space for two trucks to simultaneously dump concrete. A crew then operated the pump and pumped the concrete into the formwork to create the slab.

ReadyMix Concrete Delivery

CVEN4104 Major Project

Symbolic Modelling
A symbolic model was developed using STROBOSCOPE. The model is presented below.

ReadyMix Concrete Delivery

CVEN4104 Major Project

Data Collection
Data was collected at the site on Friday 8th April from 10.30am to 4.00pm. Data was recorded in the form of a logbook, and photographs of various activities were also recorded. The full logbook data is provided in Appendix A. Cycle and process times were obtained by keeping a log book of the times that events started and finished at the site, and by recording truck numbers printed on the back of all of the trucks as shown in the image below.

Dump time for the concrete at the site was obtained by observation and recording the start and end times of events at the site.

ReadyMix Concrete Delivery

CVEN4104 Major Project

Access was not granted into Holcims ReadyMix site at Alexandria, so accurate loading times for concrete into the trucks could not be recorded. Loading time was obtained by contacting the supplier, Holcim, by phone and getting an average loading time for the size vehicles being used. This data will be treated as a deterministic time. Return trip times for each truck was obtained by keeping a log of the time each truck left and arrived at the work site. Then the load time obtained from Holcim was subtracted from this return trip time, and the remaining time divided by 2 to estimate the haul and return times. The total number of trucks, capacity of the trucks, and total concrete pour volume was obtained from the site manager. The total pour volume was 145m3, using 6 trucks with a 5.6m3 capacity each.

ReadyMix Concrete Delivery

CVEN4104 Major Project

A summary of the data obtained is provided in the following table. Retur n 28 26.5 27 22.5 25.5 18 19.5 17.5 18 17 19.5 20 24.5 29 24.5 23 19 20.5

Cycle # 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Load 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10

Haul 28 26.5 27 22.5 25.5 18 19.5 17.5 18 17 19.5 20 24.5 29 24.5 23 19 20.5

Deliver 17 15 19 15 16 13 17 22 14 22 18 21 19 19 20 19 22 20 23 26 18

Truck Away Time 66 63 64 55 61 46 49 45 46 44 49 50 59 68 59 56 48 51

The truckmixers inter-arrival time was calculated by dividing the total time by the number of observed cycles.

ReadyMix Concrete Delivery

CVEN4104 Major Project

ReadyMix Concrete Delivery

CVEN4104 Major Project

Model Development
AnyLogic version 6.4.1 was used to develop a computer simulation of the process. Our initial/simple model was developed on the pretence that matching the Ready-Mix Concrete supply to the site requirement was the fundamental pattern to consider. The scheduling of the truckmixers inter-arrival time was perceived to be one of the main factors to model. However upon careful observation of the construction site, it became apparent that the pump crew was idle for 50% of the entire concrete dumping time. The main problem with the simple model was that it would take the same time to dump two trucks simultaneously as it would one, whereas in reality it would take longer since there would be more concrete to spread. This issue is rectified in the advanced model with the inclusion of the spreading crew which was the actual time limiting factor. After gathering information that the main reason for the slow dumping times was due to the speed at which the ground crew could operate, and in addition to the theoretical minimum pump time of 6 minutes, the spreading crew element was introduced as a means of rectifying this issue. The concrete pump was also observed to be rarely idle, and there were frequent truck queues on site. A more advanced model was developed based on observations from the site, which more accurately describe the process at hand. Due to the limitations of the system the full process could not be modelled in STROBOSCOPE, however, the tools made available to us in the AnyLogic software package allowed us to overcome those limitations. To rectify the problem of having a continuous process we used the batch object tool in our AnyLogic model. The concrete would start in entity sizes of 1,000cm3 but would get batched into a 5.6m3 entity for delivery and then un-batched back to 1,000cm3 while being dumped on site. This would allow the concrete to flow in small packet volumes through the pump and spread crew. This also required that we reduce the pumping and spreading time to match the smaller entity volume, this was simply done by dividing the time distribution by the number of concrete entities in the batch. Once the spreading process is completed for one truck load worth of concrete, the small packets get batched once more to a 5.6m3 entity and the truck and available pump port both split off from the concrete entity. This way the truck has to wait until one truckload has flowed through the pumping and spreading process before it leaves. Both the simple and advanced models have been developed and analysed. The simple model is useful for when considering interarrival rates while not considering the number of spreader crews, whereas the advanced model is useful for when determining the optimum ratio of trucks to spreader crews.

ReadyMix Concrete Delivery

CVEN4104 Major Project

Results Analysis (simple model)

Based on the initial simple model of the system, and the data recorded, the simulation was run to determine the optimum inter-arrival time. The inter-arrival time is the rate at which the trucks are dispatched from the concrete mixing plant. This was done by running the simulation using a set seed value of 1, and getting the average results for multiple runs. The output of these results is presented below.

Table 1: Optimum Inter-arrival Rate (1 Pump Truck)

Inter-arrival Rate (minutes) 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22 Overall Process Time (minutes) 288 292 318 364 415 466 518 570 622 Pump Port Utilisation 100% 83% 78% 64% 61% 53% 50% 43% 40% Maximum Queue Size (trucks) 9 3 1 0 0 0 0 0 0

Based on these results it can be seen that the lower the inter-arrival rate, the faster the overall process time will be. However there is a trade off in terms of the queue size at the site, and the utilisation of the two pump ports. Depending on the costs associated with a longer process time and having more trucks involved in the process, the best inter-arrival rate is probably 10 minutes. This rate results in a low overall process time (318 minutes), with a high pump port utilisation rate and a low number of trucks queued on site. If the overall process time was needed to be reduced significantly, another pump truck could be employed, resulting in a total of 4 pump port locations. The results of this are shown in the following table.

Table 2: Optimum Interarrival Rate (2 Pump Trucks)

Interarrival Rate (minutes) 2 3 Overall Process Time (minutes) 160 159 Pump Port Utilisation 100% 88% Maximum Queue Size (trucks) 10 4

ReadyMix Concrete Delivery 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 174 185 214 251 268 289 319 72% 67% 59% 47% 49% 47% 40%

CVEN4104 Major Project 5 2 0 0 0 0 0

It can be seen that if a second pump truck was added to the process this would significantly improve the overall process time. Depending on costs, the optimum inter-arrival rate is around 5 minutes. This would result in an overall process time of 185 minutes, with 67% pump utilisation rate. This is almost half the process time when only 1 pump truck is used. If the inter-arrival time was decreased to only 4 minutes the overall process time would decrease even further, however the maximum queue length would increase to 5 trucks which might be impractical. To optimise resources, based on the initial simple model, the best option would be to employ two pump trucks and dispatch the concrete trucks from the batch site at a rate of 1 truck every 5 minutes. This would result in a low process time, reducing costs associated with employing crews, and will result in less queuing of trucks at the site. Less queues at the site mean lower costs to the concrete delivery company (Holcim).

ReadyMix Concrete Delivery

CVEN4104 Major Project

Results Analysis (advanced model)

Based on the advanced model of the system, and the data recorded, the simulation was run to determine the optimum combination of trucks and crews. Our expectations before running the simulation were as follows: Simply increasing the number of trucks will have little effect on the process duration as in our real life observations the concrete pump was rarely idle and there were frequent truck queues on site. Raising the number of spreader crews in the advanced model would dramatically reduce the process duration, as we knew that the ground crew was the limiting factor that was slowing down the concrete pouring process. The duration of the process could probably be halved since the pump crew was observed to be idle for around 50% of the entire concrete dumping time

Trucks 6 7 8 6 7 8 9 10 6 7 8 9 10

Crew s 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 2 3 3 3 3 3

Pump Crew Utilisation 37% 37% 37% 57% 62% 66% 66% 66% 59% 62% 67% 71% 72%

Spread Crew Utilisation 91% 91% 91% 74% 82% 83% 83% 83% 52% 54% 59% 62% 63%

Maximu m Queue 1 2 3 0 0 1 2 3 0 1 1 1 2

Total Time (minutes) 551 551 551 341 308 302 302 302 326 307 284 269 264

Table 3: Optimum Truck/Crew Ratio (1 Pump Truck)

ReadyMix Concrete Delivery

CVEN4104 Major Project

Note: Utilisation values are lower than what is shown in the table above. AnyLogic takes the initial load and haul time into account which deflates the actual utilisation percentages.

ReadyMix Concrete Delivery

CVEN4104 Major Project

As expected with 1 Crew, increasing the number of trucks had little effect on the total time. In our particular simulation, it actually resulted in zero improvement in total time which cited the initial problem of truck queues in our initial observation. However with 2 Crews, increasing the number of trucks had a substantial effect on the total time which validates our observation that the ground crews were the limiting factor in the process. By adding an extra crew and increasing the number of trucks to 7, an improvement of 243 minutes was observed compared to the initial setup of 6 trucks and 1 crew. This saw an improvement of 44% in the total time which was very close to our expectation due to the observed pump crew idle time of 50%. Adding extra trucks was deemed to be unnecessary as cost-to-productivity would have reached negative gains. Total time for 2 crews was limited to 302 minutes with an infinite number of trucks which allowed us to come to the conclusion that the combination of 7 trucks and 2 Crews resulted in the most optimum synchronization of the two processes. By increasing the number of Crews to 3, the total time was further reduced but not without a few disadvantages. Spread Crew Utilisation hovered between 50% and 65% which meant that spread crew idle time had become an issue. Employing a combination of 10 Trucks and 3 Crews saw an improvement of just 44 minutes over 7 Trucks and 2 Crews. Queues at the pump truck also reached a maximum of 2 trucks which when combined with the additional 3 trucks and spreader crew was concluded to be an unnecessary cost sacrifice to achieve a faster total process time.

ReadyMix Concrete Delivery

CVEN4104 Major Project

Conclusion

ReadyMix Concrete Delivery

CVEN4104 Major Project

Reference

ReadyMix Concrete Delivery

CVEN4104 Major Project

Appendix A: Data Collection