Research on earthwork allocation considering multiple material types

With increasingly stringent national environmental protection requirements, the greater utilization of excavation materials and the reduction of borrow-area scale during large-scale project construction have become new challenges in earthwork allocation. To address this issue, this study conducts an in-depth analysis of the effects of material heterogeneity and excavation–fill control on earthwork allocation, and on the basis of the conventional linear programming model, proposes a new earthwork allocation model and method for large-scale projects that incorporates both material heterogeneity and excavation–fill control strategies. In this method, the concept of material composition is introduced into excavation and filling activities, while the strategies of “determining excavation based on filling demand” and “determining filling based on excavation conditions” are incorporated into excavation–fill schedule control. Through the integrated treatment of excavation, filling, transportation, spoil disposal, and material extraction, the proposed method minimizes the total cost of the overall system involving excavation, filling, spoil disposal, and the extraction and transportation of earth and rock materials, while ensuring construction progress and quality, thereby achieving rapid and economical construction. To improve the efficiency of refined earthwork allocation, a dynamic earthwork allocation system, namely PlanTransSimu (PTS), was developed in C# based on the proposed method, featuring effective visualization and user interaction functions, and was applied to a practical engineering case. The case study shows that, compared with traditional methods, the proposed approach enables refined earthwork allocation under filling requirements involving multiple material types, and through excavation–fill control, effectively improves material utilization, reduces spoil disposal and secondary rehandling, and lowers earthwork transfer and allocation costs.