Covering polygons with discs: The problem of crane selection and location on construction sites

Cranes are a key element in construction projects as they are the primary lifting equipment and among the most expensive construction equipment. Thus, crane selection and location are important factors for a construction project's operational and economic success. In this research, we focus on a site with supply and demand areas that have to be connected by tower cranes. There are several tower crane models differing in certain specifications such as costs or operating radius. The objective is to select cranes and determine their locations so that each demand area is connected to its supply area at minimum cost. We detail the problem setting and show how to obtain a discrete set of candidate locations for each crane model without losing optimality. This discretization allows us to reduce our problem to the classic set cover problem. Despite its NP-hardness, instances of considerable size can be solved to optimality within reasonable computing time using a standard solver. In an extensive computational study, we analyze the performance of the proposed approach in terms of solution quality, computation times, and drivers of computational effort. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.