<em>Google Earth</em> Augmented for Earthwork Construction Planning

This chapter introduces GoogleEarthWork which is an augmented geographic information system (GIS) based on Google Earth to manage and visualize heterogeneous site information, especially 3D models, aerial and ground images, panoramas, and GIS data of the site environment. The concept is to realize a highly automated end-to-end earthwork construction planning system that is able to generate project management deliverables from heterogeneous information and enhance the usefulness and intelligence of GIS for better project planning and control in earthwork construction. With identified constraints from the augmented Google Earth, the earthwork planning problem is formulated, and an optimized executable plan can be automatically generated, including work breakdown structure and project network model. Demonstration cases are provided to prove concepts of and illustrate functionalities of GoogleEarthWork in support of earthwork construction planning in realistic settings

Optimize earthwork hauling plan with minimum cost flow network

Linear programming is commonly used in earthwork hauling plan. However special expertise in forming and solving linear equations, along with considerable efforts in interpreting results, is required to apply these methods in practice. Moreover, previous methods mainly focus on cost estimation and thus largely ignore the constructability issues; this makes earthwork hauling plan impractical for construction planning. We aim to address these problems by introducing an intuitive graph based approach which optimizes the earthwork hauling plan using the minimum cost flow network. We choose the total traveling time as the objective function to be minimized in order to separate the earthwork hauling plan from other factors such as fleet combination. Our method directly connects adjacent sections allowing accessibility between them, instead of connecting the centers of cut and fill cells as potential haul routes as in previous methods. As a result, the proposed method is capable to handle constructability issues caused by “soft blocks” -which cannot be eliminated in establishing the standard flow network as their existence impose constraints on the grading plan. The graphic earth flow network can be used to guide the execution of the earthwork project and generate multiple grading plans, providing more flexibility compared to traditional methods. We present an earthmoving example with a reserved soft area and show that the proposed method is graphically intuitive, easy to establish and able to handle soft blocks.Non UBCUnreviewedFacultyOthe