MULTI-AGENT APPROACH FOR AUTOMATED GUIDANCE AND CONTROL OF EARTHWORK EQUIPMENT
Faridaddin Vahdatikhaki1, Amin Hammad2 and Alhusain Taher3
1) Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Building, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
2) Professor, Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
3) Graduate Research Assistant, Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Abstract: In 2012, 74 out of the total of 775 fatalities (nearly 10%), have been reported as primarily or secondarily caused by major earthmoving equipment, e.g., excavators, loaders, graders, scrapers, compactors, or dump trucks. Additionally, the construction working environment is heavily susceptible to unforeseen changes and circumstances that could impact the project, both cost and schedule wise. Location-based Guidance Systems (LGSs), e.g., Automated Machine Control/Guidance (AMC/G), are introduced and have been employed for the purpose of high-precision earthwork operations. However, the application of LGS has been restricted to the machine-level operation control and improvement. In view of the LGS ability to control the finest motion of earthwork construction equipment, vested by such systems, there is a great potential to boost their level of application to the project level, where decisions about the equipment control are made based on the global consideration of a fleet rather than a local view of one single equipment. On this premise, this research aims to design a Multi-Agent System (MAS) for a fleet of earthwork equipment that combines LGS technology with Near Real-time Simulation (NRTS) to support the workers and operators on the construction site and enhance their safety by providing proactive warnings to workers and equipment operators. A case study is developed to validate the proposed method. It is found that the proposed MAS structure is able to effectively address the fleet-level communication between earthwork equipment and potentially improve the productivity and safety of earthwork projects.
Keywords: Multi-agent systems, Earthwork Equipment, Real-time Location Systems, Simulation.
Bibliographical Reference:
Faridaddin Vahdatikhaki, Amin Hammad, Alhusain Taher. “MULTI-AGENT APPROACH FOR AUTOMATED GUIDANCE AND CONTROL OF EARTHWORK EQUIPMENT.” In Proceedings of International Conference on Civil and Building Engineering Informatics (ICCBEI 2015), 87. Tokyo, Japan, 2015.