A large number of major airport construction and expansion projects are on-going and being planned in order to meet the current and expected increases in air traffic demand. These projects include the expansion of terminals, runways and taxiways and they are often performed in close proximity to critical airport areas. This close proximity increases the level of hazards to both aviation safety and airport security, and presents construction planners with critical and serious construction site layout planning challenges, including: how to optimize site layout planning in order to address the conflicting objectives of maximizing aviation safety, maximizing airport security and minimizing construction site layout costs; and how to maintain optimality for the developed site layout plans in a dynamically changing construction environment. This project addresses these site layout planning challenges using original concepts that integrates multi-objective and dynamic optimization methodologies to enable construction planners to identify and frequently update a set of optimal site layout plans that provide optimal tradeoffs among the conflicting site layout planning objectives. The main research objectives of this project are to (1) develop novel multi-objective optimization models for airport construction site layouts that are capable of maximizing the control of construction debris hazards near critical airport areas, minimizing the hazards of attracting wildlife to airport construction sites, minimizing and eliminating all potential security breaches that may originate from construction sites, and minimizing overall site layout costs; and (2) develop robust information technology frameworks that are capable of supporting dynamic optimization and the continuous updating of optimal construction site layout plans, and providing enhanced visualization of the generated optimal solutions. The project integrates advanced methodologies from several disciplines, including construction and airport engineering, evolutionary computations, information technology, and object-oriented modeling in order to address a fundamental and critical gap in the existing knowledge and understanding of multi-objective and dynamic site layout optimization. This project provides a broad and profound impact on (1) construction engineering education; (2) construction industry; and (3) society. For construction engineering education, the project focuses on developing educational material and modules and integrating them in two undergraduate and graduate courses. For the construction industry, the research developments provide construction planners and airport operators with novel and robust models that are capable of minimizing the spread of hazardous construction debris to critical air traffic zones, minimizing construction-related attractions of hazardous wildlife species, maximizing airport security during construction to prevent unauthorized access to secure airport areas, and complying with all relevant Federal Aviation Administration safety and security requirements. For society, the project addresses current and future national priorities including the need to improve national security and public safety during the construction and expansion of critical infrastructure systems such as airports, seaports, nuclear power plants, electrical power systems, and oil production and distribution facilities.
