MACHINE LEARNING BASED CONSTRUCTION SIMULATION AND OPTIMIZATION

Building construction comprises interaction and interdependence among processes. Discrete-event simulation (DES) is widely applied to model these processes interaction. To find optimal construction plans, optimization technique is usually integrated with DES. However, present simulation-optimization integrated method directly invokes simulation model within optimization algorithms, which is found significantly computationally expensive. This study proposes a machine learning based construction simulation and optimization integrated method. After trained by DES, the machine learning model accelerates simulation-optimization integration by nearly real-time providing fitness evaluation within optimization. This method was implemented into a real construction project for construction time-cost-environment optimization. Results show that proposed machine learning based method significantly reduce computing time compared with original simulation-optimization integration. Less than 1% of construction cost and time improvement were miss, while greenhouse gas emissions obtained same performance. The new method could be a more effective DES and optimization integration approach for practical engineering application.