Automated multi-objective optimization system for airport site layouts

Airport construction planners often face the problem of identifying optimal locations for temporary construction facilities on site, as the planned locations of these facilities usually influence important and conflicting planning objectives such as improving the efficiency of construction operations and maintaining safety on site. Careful evaluation of all feasible locations for temporary facilities and the selection of an optimal layout are needed in order to achieve these multiple important objectives. This paper presents the development of a practical automated system to optimize multiple conflicting planning objectives and provide all possible optimal tradeoff solutions among these objectives. The system is implemented and integrated in four main modules: (1) a comprehensive multi-objective optimization engine that integrates and optimizes construction work zone safety, construction-related aviation safety, construction-related airport security, and all relevant site layout costs; (2) a relational database that integrates planning data and stores all the generated optimal solutions; (3) an Input/Output module to facilitate specifying planning and optimization parameters and retrieving the generated optimal site layout solutions; and (4) a visualization module that communicates with external CAD software in order to support the visualization of the generated optimal site layout plans.

Research Highlights
► A multi-objective optimization system is developed for site layout planning.
► Objectives include construction safety, aviation safety and airport security.
► Capabilities of generating tradeoff solutions, visualization and CAD integration.
► Increasing population size is more effective than increasing number of generations.
► This should help to advance optimization of site layouts for airport expansions.