Reducing construction carbon emissions in logistics: The dynamic bowser routing problem

This work presents the results from the project RECCEL (REducing Construction Carbon Emissions in Logistics), where our team collaborated with Costain, the major UK provider of transportation engineering solutions, and CENEX, a UK leading expert in low carbon transportation solutions. We investigate opportunities offered by telematics and analytics to enable better informed, and more integrated, collaborative management decisions on construction sites. The major barriers to a fully integrated low-carbon construction supply chain are identified. A set of solutions is outlined, including an Asset Monitoring Dashboard, to visualize and analyse the available data; and a decision support system for Asset Routing for Refuelling.
We focus on this later problem and we deal with the efficient refuelling of assets across construction sites. More specifically, we develop decision support models that, by leveraging on data supplied by different assets, schedule refuelling operations by minimising the distance travelled by the bowser truck as well as fuel shortages. Motivated by a practical case study elicited in the context of a study we recently conducted at the C610 Systemwide Crossrail site, we introduce the Dynamic Bowser Routing Problem.
We investigate deterministic and stochastic variants of this problem. To tackle deterministic variants, we introduce and contrast a bilinear programming model and a mixed-integer linear programming model. To tackle stochastic variants, by leveraging on a new general purpose software library for stochastic modeling, we introduce a complete stochastic dynamic programming model, as well as a novel heuristic we named “sample waning.” We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approaches in the context of an extensive computational study designed around information and data collected at C610 Systemwide and/or supplied by our project partners.