3D-Gis based earthwork planning system for productivity improvement

This paper proposes a GIS-based planning system for improving earthwork productivity. The system takes two planning steps considering 3-dimensional topographical conditions and other necessary information of the construction site and surroundings: 1) internal earthwork planning for earthmoving within construction site and 2) external earthwork planning for importing and exporting soil to and from construction site. Useful functions such as dissecting and grouping earth volumes for detailed task order creation, 3-dimensional analysis of haul routes, and assembling geographical and non-geographical information for equipment selection and earthwork process design are provided. Example analysis of the system is demonstrated in the paper and the analysis proves that 3-dimensional spatial manipulation and objectification of unstructured topographical data such as cut/fillmass (features) can be effectively used for earthwork planning. Copyright ASCE 2009