Optimisation of Resources for Pipelaying

Project CE5805
Simulation Project Team

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21 Lower Kent Ridge Road, Singapore (119077)
 Department of Civil Engineering
CE 5805 Pipe Laying Project

FINAL REPORT

SIMULATION PROJECT

CE 5805 PIPE LAYING PROJECT

ANDI WIJAYA (HT083595A)

ADITYA NUGROHO (HT083276E)
YAN ZHEN (A0066288)

DEPARTMENT OF CIVIL ENGINEERING

NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE

2010

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 Department of Civil Engineering
CE 5805 Pipe Laying Project

31 October 2010 Our ref.:CE5805/010.00C/10/0001

Construction Director
AAY Construction Pte Ltd
6 Tuas View
Singapore

For the attention of Mr. David Chua Kim Huat

Letter of Transmittal
Dear Sir,

Contract 5805 - Pipe Laying Project Simulation

Simulation Result and Recommendations

We are pleased to submit herewith the final report of the study on pipelaying that soon will
commence and be carried out by AAY Construction Pte. Ltd.

As per contract agreement clause 4.1.2, the detailed report on the simulation report and
recommendations is hereby submitted.

This report presents all the tasks of the simulation and recommendations on the pipelaying
construction as well as major findings of the optimal (highest productivity) configuration of
resources for the operation. Final report identifies the pipelaying problems and the modeling
of this construction problem.The resources, productivity rates and capacities are then
presented based on the finding of the pipelaying problems by using ezStrobe programme, a
construction simulation variant based on Stroboscope language. Finally the report explores
the recommendations for the strategy and optimal mix for the successful execution of this
pipe laying project.

We hope that the result of this study will contribute to your success in this pipelaying
construction.

Yours faithfully,
for and on behalf of National University of Singapore

Andi WIJAYA
Head of Construction Simulation Project Team

Enc. Simulation Report + 1 CD

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 Department of Civil Engineering
CE 5805 Pipe Laying Project

1. INTRODUCTION OF THE PIPE LAYING PROJECT

The project called an extensive pipe laying of total length 10 kilometers. The pipe to be laid is
of 45 cm diameter and made of steel. Each piece of pipe is supplied as 10 meters long piece.
The pipe has to be laid at an invert level of 1.5m below ground level. The pipe has a
bituminous outer wrapping, which prevent corrosion. Due to the nature of the pipe, a screened
sand layer has to be placed around the pipe in order to protect this bituminous outer wrapping.
The sand for this pipe laying project is to be obtained at an average distance of 8 kilometers
from the site. A certain clause in the contract in the insurance contract also spell that not more
than 100 meters of trench can be left open at any point in time. That makes the backfill
operation lags to be critical, since any lag will delay the excavation and pipe laying process.

The work is to be carried out with 10 hours shift a day. Traffic condition from the site to the
supply of sand site is surveyed and found that there will be always two hours every day when
the travel times for the trucks haul and return are 20% longer. There is also 30% probability
that the excavation of the ground to take 40% more time than usual, due to some area with
harder ground to conquer.

2. PROJECT SIMULATION TOOL CHOICE

The project initially called for the project simulation using INSIGHT1 program, which utilizes
Cyclic operations Network (CYCLONE) language. CYCLONE was specifically designed for
construction. CYCLONE is purely network based and as a consequence is very simple.
Unfortunately, INSIGHT with its CYCLONE language is a command-based program that is
difficult both for debugging. It is also limited by unavailability of graphical output.

In order to model this construction process realistically, another simulation tool was chosen
for this project, STROBOSCOPE2. STROBOSCOPE presents a radical departure from
INSIGHT program. STROBOSCOPE is an acronym for State and ResOurce Based
Simulation of Construction ProcEsses. It is a programming language specifically designed to
model construction operations. STROBOSCOPE models are based on a network of
interconnected modelling elements and on a series of programming statements that give the
elements unique behavior and control the simulation.

Stroboscope’s ability to dynamically access the state of the simulation and the properties of
the resources involved in an operation differentiate it from other construction simulation tools.
The state of the simulation refers to such things as the number of trucks waiting to be loaded;
the current simulation time; the number of times an activity has occurred; and the last time a
particular activity started. Access to the properties of resources means that operations can be
sensitive to resource properties such as size, weight, and cost on an individual (the size of the
specific loader used in an operation) or an aggregate basis (the sum of the weights of a set of
steel shapes waiting to be erected).

1
Halpin and Woodhead. 1976. “Design of Construction and Process Operations”. John Wiley and Sons.
2
http://www.ezstrobe.com/2009/10/stroboscope.html accessed on 31 October 2010

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 Department of Civil Engineering
CE 5805 Pipe Laying Project

Furthermore, the development of the STROBOSCOPE programming has reached a state,

where a graphical programming interface is available. EzStrobe3 is a variant of Stroboscope
programming using entirely graphical simulation system. There is no hassle of understanding
STROBOSCOPE language structure in order to simulate the construction method by using
EzStrobe, thus making it the best available construction simulation tool today. EzStrobe was
chosen in this project to the simulation tool for accessing the optimality of resources needed
to carry out the pipe laying project.

3. OBJECTIVES

The objectives of the simulation of this operation are:

• To better understand the construction process and understand the critical path in this
operation
• To identify resources and perform optimization on the resources to carry out this
project on budget and on time with the best saving available.

4. PIPE LAYING PROJECT MODEL

Following resources have been identified in order to ensure the successful construction
operation:
1. Trucks – to haul material to the site for back-filing the trench
2. Loaders – to load material to the trucks
3. Spotters – to unload material once the sand are delivered to the site
4. Crane and Crew Team – to lay pipe and fit the coupling
5. Labor Crew – to back fill and prepare the trench bed
6. Excavator – to excavate trench for laying pipe

Following activities have been identified too for the realization of the model in EzStrobe:
1. Load truck with the sand
2. Hauling of the loaded truck to the site
3. Hauling of the empty truck from site to the sand supply site
4. Offload materials from truck to back fill the trench
5. Truck Inspection
6. Trench Excavation
7. Preparation of Trench
8. Pipe laying and fitting
9. Back filling pipe
10. Trench covering

The resources and activities are combined into single process in EzStrobe, forming the
complete construction process. The process diagram and the program have been drawn and
shown as following:

3
http://www.ezstrobe.com/2009/10/ezstrobe.html accessed on 31 October 2010

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 Department of Civil Engineering
CE 5805 Pipe Laying Project

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 Department of Civil Engineering
CE 5805 Pipe Laying Project

The EzStrobe program is attached in this report as Pipelay with *.vsd (Microsoft Office
Vision Extension). The STROBOSCOPE package needed to be installed. The educational
version of this program is downloadable from www.ezstrobe.com.

Other than above, the following costs of utilizing resources are shown in the table below:
No. Resources Name Costs
1 Loader SGD 80/loading activity
2 Truck Cost SGD 50/haulage
3 Spotter Cost SGD 25/Offload
4 Excavator Cost SGD 100/10 meter excavation
5 Labor Cost SGD 90/team/day

5. SIMULATION WITH AVAILABLE RESOURCES

Simulation was firstly done with the best guess available resources configuration as follows:

The simulation result shows that the project of laying 10 kilometers pipe with above resources
will yield following result:

** Calculated results after simulation **

Meter per day that can be laid : 291.509

Total Loader Cost for Project : 81280
Total Truck Cost for Project : 101200
Total Spotter Cost for Project : 25200
Total Excavator Cost for Project : 101600
Total Labor Cost for Project : 270720
Number of weekdays needed to complete project : 34.3042

The company will need to spend 35 working days with 10 shifts a day to complete the pipe
laying project with total construction cost of SGD309,280. The productivity of using these
available resources is of laying 291.509 meters pipe/day.

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 Department of Civil Engineering
CE 5805 Pipe Laying Project

Attached below is the output of the EzStrobe simulation:

Stroboscope Model Pipelay.vsd (424904000)

** Model input parameters **

Number of Truck :3
Number of Loader :1
Number of Spotter :1
No. of crane&crew team for laying pipe & fit coupling :1
No. of labor crew for backfill and prepare trench bed :1
Length of open trench allowed (e.g. 10 = 100m) : 10
Number of excavator :1

** Calculated results after simulation **

Meter per day that can be laid : 291.509

Total Loader Cost for Project : 81280
Total Truck Cost for Project : 101200
Total Spotter Cost for Project : 25200
Total Excavator Cost for Project : 101600
Total Labor Cost for Project : 270720
Number of weekdays needed to complete project : 34.3042

Statistics report at simulation time 5145.63

Queue Res Cur Tot AvWait AvCont SDCont MinCont MaxCont

===========================================================================================
BackFill ezs 1.00 252.00 6.85 0.34 0.47 0.00 1.00
CraneCrewIdle ezs 1.00 252.00 14.34 0.70 0.46 0.00 1.00
ExcPipeLength ezs 1.00 253.00 20.27 1.00 0.06 0.00 2.00
ExcavatorIdle ezs 0.00 254.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 1.00
ExtraTime ezs 5.00 81.00 274.87 4.33 1.23 0.00 7.00
LaborCrewIdle ezs 1.00 502.00 0.28 0.03 0.16 0.00 1.00
LoadedTruck ezs 0.00 254.00 0.73 0.04 0.20 0.00 2.00
LoaderIdle ezs 1.00 255.00 19.38 0.96 0.19 0.00 1.00
NormalExc ezs 0.00 178.00 15.09 0.52 0.68 0.00 5.00
OffPeak ezs 1.00 215.00 7.43 0.31 0.46 0.00 1.00
OffPeakInitial ezs 0.00 9.00 5.51 0.01 0.10 0.00 1.00
OffPeakInitialRezs 0.00 9.00 1.23 0.00 0.05 0.00 1.00
OffPeakRet ezs 0.00 214.00 12.16 0.51 0.50 0.00 1.00
OffPeakWithdraRezs 0.00 8.00 1.24 0.00 0.04 0.00 1.00
OffPeakWithdrawezs 0.00 8.00 5.46 0.01 0.09 0.00 1.00
Peak ezs 0.00 57.00 5.57 0.06 0.24 0.00 1.00
PeakRet ezs 0.00 55.00 10.18 0.11 0.31 0.00 1.00
PermitExcavate ezs 0.00 259.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 10.00
PipeInPosition ezs 1.00 251.00 28.26 1.38 1.20 0.00 4.00
SpotterIdle ezs 1.00 253.00 19.94 0.98 0.14 0.00 1.00
TrenchBedReady ezs 0.00 251.00 0.11 0.01 0.07 0.00 1.00
TrenchReady ezs 2.00 253.00 27.49 1.35 0.48 0.00 3.00
TruckQueue ezs 0.00 254.00 0.01 0.00 0.03 0.00 3.00
TruckReady ezs 0.00 252.00 0.22 0.01 0.10 0.00 1.00
WaitToOffload ezs 2.00 254.00 36.13 1.78 0.51 0.00 3.00

Activity Cur Tot 1stSt LstSt AvDur SDDur MinD MaxD AvInt SDInt MinI MaxI
====================================================================================================
BackFillPipe 0 250 47.29 5129.63 14.99 0.85 12.82 17.53 20.41 3.54 13.39 31.11

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 Department of Civil Engineering
CE 5805 Pipe Laying Project

BreakDown 0 13 407.78 5058.15 19.96 0.66 19.14 21.31 387.53 258.39 15.75 859.54
CoverTrench 1 250 61.37 5145.63 3.00 0.12 2.70 3.28 20.42 3.61 13.16 31.32
EightOffPeak 1 9 0.00 4893.27 480.00 0.00 480.00 480.00 611.66 6.12 601.57 620.05
EightOffPeakRet 1 9 0.00 4821.00 480.00 0.00 480.00 480.00 602.62 2.95 600.00 606.45
ExcavationExtra 0 76 183.09 5057.29 25.24 2.58 19.20 30.93 64.99 43.39 20.36 224.12
ExcavationUsual 1 178 0.00 5138.11 18.18 1.96 13.86 23.10 29.03 18.81 13.86 96.79
HaulMatOffPeak 0 206 0.77 5128.74 12.57 0.63 11.07 14.27 25.01 24.96 11.45 152.75
HaulMatPeak 0 48 504.99 4878.24 15.33 0.66 14.14 17.04 93.05 177.14 14.73 519.36
InspectTruck 0 252 36.12 5138.56 0.50 0.00 0.50 0.50 20.33 3.90 13.83 31.00
LayPipeFit 0 251 41.16 5129.63 6.10 0.19 5.62 6.66 20.35 8.04 5.83 37.78
LoadTruck 0 254 0.00 5127.86 0.80 0.05 0.65 0.92 20.27 6.91 0.73 51.24
OffLoadMaterial 0 252 35.77 5138.11 0.40 0.04 0.27 0.49 20.33 3.90 13.86 30.93
PrepTrenchBed 0 251 36.12 5124.75 5.00 0.30 4.27 5.88 20.35 8.32 4.40 37.90
ReturnOffPeak 1 206 36.62 5139.06 7.69 0.47 6.39 9.01 24.89 24.72 6.94 158.31
ReturnPeak 0 46 494.73 4804.48 9.15 0.53 7.71 10.17 95.77 178.91 8.70 528.53
Situation 0 259 0.00 5127.84 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 19.88 5.86 0.00 64.24
TwoHoursPeak 0 8 484.23 4758.62 120.00 0.00 120.00 120.00 610.63 6.98 603.61 622.24
TwoHrsPeakRet 0 8 480.00 4701.00 120.00 0.00 120.00 120.00 603.00 2.97 600.00 606.45

Contents of the Future Events List at simulation time 5145.63

Instance Start End

========================================
ReturnOffPeak(205) 5139.06 5145.78
CoverTrench(249) 5145.63 5148.63
ExcavationUsual(177)5138.11 5154.85
EightOffPeakRet(8) 4821.00 5301.00
EightOffPeak(8) 4893.27 5373.27

Total Number of Named Objects : 140

Total Number of Variables : 244
Total Number of Statements : 31

Integral Stat Ave. Wait

=========================

-------------------------------------
Execution Time = 521.80 seconds

6. OPTIMIZING THE CONSTRUCTION THROUGHPUT

The pipe laying process was optimized by analyzing the output of EzStrobe. It can be
observed from above output that there is shortage of some resources for some processes,
creating a bottleneck in this construction process. The average truck queue waiting time is
statistically shown as 0.01 minutes at any point in time. That shows the demand of truck
usage is high, thus increasing the trucks units will be able to increase the productivity. Labor
crew average waiting time between each consecutive activity is shown as 0.28 minutes. That
shows the workload of this labor crew is high. Increasing the team size will enable the speedy
execution of this project. However, it is in the contract term that only one excavator can be
used in this project, thus disallowing the expansion of excavation facilities to expedite

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 Department of Civil Engineering
CE 5805 Pipe Laying Project

construction. It is also shown in the simulation that excavation forms a bottleneck in this
construction process with virtually zero waiting time between two excavations.

Following configurations were selected in the simulation to find the best possible strategy for
the execution of this project together with its expected throughput and costs:

Conf. Resources Used Cost of Construction Productivity Timeframe needed

(variable costs) to complete project
A 3 Trucks SGD580,000 291.509 35 working days
1 Loader meters
1 Spotter pipe/day.
1 Crane & Crew team
1 labor crew
1 excavator
B 5 Trucks SGD579,620 293.112 34 working days
1 Loader meters
1 Spotter pipe/day.
1 Crane & Crew team
1 labor crew
1 excavator
C 3 Trucks SGD578,780 292.87 34 working days
1 Loader meters
1 Spotter pipe/day.
1 Crane & Crew team
2 labor crew
1 excavator
D 5 Trucks SGD586,500 525.628 19 working days
1 Loader meters/pipe/
1 Spotter day
1 Crane & Crew team
2 labor crew
2 excavator
E 7 Trucks SGD584,180 553.579 18 working days
1 Loader meters/pipe/
1 Spotter day
1 Crane & Crew team
2 labor crew
2 excavator

7. RECOMMENDATIONS

Trucks, excavators and labor crew for trench bed preparation and backfilling form the critical
resources that need to be expanded. However, it was also shown that in configuration B, C
above that expanding just the trucks fleet and labor crew teams do not improve much the
productivity of the track laying process. Excavator fleet needs to be expanded as well in order
to grab the benefit of trucks fleet and labor crew team expansion. However, it is unfortunate
that in the contract, AAY Construction Pte. Ltd. has specified that only one excavator can be

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 Department of Civil Engineering
CE 5805 Pipe Laying Project

used in this project. Thus, our recommendation is to utilize the current available resources to
perform this job (configuration A).

However, if additional excavator machine can be purchased by your company, we will

recommend expanding your labor team to two and your trucks fleets to seven (configuration
E). In that way, the productivity will increase by double (553 meters of pipe/day). The
variable costs remain quite constant for this activity. Of course, the fixed investment cost in
buying the equipment or recruiting labor team shall also be part of your consideration.

8. ATTACHMENTS

Pipelay.vsd – the EzStrobe program of the pipe laying project problem

Simulation01.sto – the EzStrobe output of pipe laying project with configuration A
Simulation02.sto – the EzStrobe output of pipe laying project with configuration B
Simulation03.sto – the EzStrobe output of pipe laying project with configuration C
Simulation04.sto – the EzStrobe output of pipe laying project with configuration D
Simulation05.sto – the EzStrobe output of pipe laying project with configuration E
ezStrobe Simulation-How it works.avi – the screen capture video of the EzStrobe Simulation
Storoboscope folder – the STROBOSCOPE and EzStrobe Installation Software

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