Optimality gap of experts' decisions in concrete delivery dispatching

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-review

Contributors

  • Mojtaba Maghrebi - , University of New South Wales (Author)
  • S. Travis Waller - , University of New South Wales (Author)
  • Claude Sammut - , University of New South Wales (Author)

Abstract

Concrete delivery dispatching suffers from a lack of practical solutions and therefore, in the absence of automatic solutions, experts are hired to handle this task. In addition, the concrete delivery dispatching problem can be modelled mathematically but it can only solve up to medium sizes of this problem within a practical time. This paper attempts to answer the question of how much we can rely on experts' decisions. First, the concrete delivery problem is presented. Second, a benchmark for the problem is achieved; two heuristic methods are used for those instances that their exact solutions are not available. Finally, the experts' decisions are compared with the obtained benchmarks to assess the optimality gap of the experts. A field dataset which belongs to an active Ready Mixed Concrete (RMC) is used to evaluate the proposed idea. The results show that experts' decisions are near to optimum, with an average accuracy of 90%. However, after comparing individual decisions between optimisation models and the experts' decisions, we can conclude that optimisation models only try to achieve the lowest cost, while the expert prefers a more stable dispatching system at slightly higher cost.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)17-23
Number of pages7
JournalJournal of Building Engineering
Volume2
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jun 2015
Peer-reviewedYes
Externally publishedYes

External IDs

ORCID /0000-0002-2939-2090/work/141543861

Keywords

Keywords

  • Concrete delivery, Experts' decisions, Integer Programming, Mixed Integer Programming, Ready Mixed Concrete, Robust-GA, Sequential-GA