Optimal transportation planning for prefabricated products in construction

Abstract

Prefabrication-based construction has several advantages, such as short building time and superior quality. The transportation of prefabricated products from factories to construction sites has two key issues to consider. One is how to efficiently utilize the capacity of trucks in order to use as few trucks as possible, and the other is how to postpone the transportation of prefabricated products so as to pay for them as late as possible. This study proposes a mathematical programming model to optimize the transportation planning of prefabricated products to minimize the sum of trucking transportation costs and inventory holding costs. Extensive numerical experiments show that the optimal transport plan generated by the model outperforms the plan obtained by a greedy approach by 10% of cost savings, implying the effectiveness of the model for the construction industry.