Development of an automated dispatching complex for construction and road machines at distributed production sites

Abstract

The fleet of construction and road machines of Russian companies operates at an average capacity utilisation level of about 56% and with a high share of equipment that has exhausted its depreciation period, which creates a gap between the available fleet resource and the actual output. The regulatory framework of construction digitalisation is built around the information model of a capital construction facility and does not cover operational data on machine performance; requirements for on-board navigation and communication equipment apply to wheeled vehicles and do not affect self-propelled machines registered with the technical supervision authorities. The aim of the study is to develop the structure and to substantiate quantitatively the parameters of an automated dispatching complex serving a machine fleet at several spatially separated sites. Discrete-event simulation of the annual operation cycle with 10 000 Monte Carlo iterations, factor decomposition of the operating-time increment by the chain substitution method, and calculation of the discounted effect for three architectural options of the complex were applied. For a model fleet of 37 machines distributed across seven sites, the weighted average annual operating time rises from 929,8 to 1171,6 machine-hours, and the fleet utilisation coefficient from 0,465 to 0,586. Factor decomposition attributes 40,6% of the increment to the growth of technical readiness and 59,4% to within-shift utilisation. Reducing the average machine relocation approval time below 26 minutes yields no further increment: the constraint shifts to the transport leg of about 96 km. The full architecture with predictive diagnostics yields a net present value of 16,85 million roubles against 16,50 million roubles for the option without it, while requiring 69,5% higher capital investment. The predominance of the within-shift factor over the technical readiness factor means that the fleet output reserve is concentrated in the dispatching contour of planning and approval, whereas the diagnostic contour plays a subordinate role in relation to it and saturates noticeably faster.