Evaluating the Impact of Resource Utilization Decisions on Energy Consumption in Construction Projects

摘要

Evaluation and optimization of energy consumption in construction projects are key to reducing the environmental footprint of construction and project direct costs. Construction projects consume energy in different forms and for various purposes including equipment and tools operation, material embodied energy, and jobsite maintenance. Previous research studies on the environmental impacts of construction focused on evaluating greenhouse gasses or total energy consumption assuming average fuel consumption rates. Therefore, the impact of resource utilization and other planning decisions on energy consumption is not fully understood. In addition, most of these studies focused only on material manufacturing and/or building maintenance with minor focus on evaluating energy consumption during the construction phase. This paper, therefore, presents the preliminary stage for developing a new framework to evaluate the impact of several planning decisions (e.g. resource selection and productivity, construction methods, overtime working policies) on fuel and energy consumption during the construction phase. The proposed framework is designed to (1) identify the main variables affecting energy consumption and their practical ranges; (2) schedule construction projects for different resource utilization scenarios and calculate the associated energy consumption; and (3) evaluate the energy performance of these scenarios in order to identify the most efficient ones.