CSCE Annual Conference Growing with youth – Croître avec les jeunes Laval (Greater Montreal) June 12 - 15, 2019 CONSIDERING ACTIVITY CONFLICTS IN TOWER CRANES LAYOUT PLANNING USING AGENT-BASED SIMULATION Ahmed Younes 1 and Mohamed Marzouk 2,3 1,2 Structural Engineering Department, Faculty of Engineering, Cairo University, Egypt 3 mm_marzouk@yahoo.com Abstract: Tower cranes are considered to be one of the most important equipment in large construction projects. The layout planning of tower cranes that defines the types, the quantities and the positions of the tower cranes, has a significant impact on the overall productivity and cost effectiveness of construction projects. Previous research utilized either mathematical methods, or visualization tools to find an optimal tower crane layout plan. But such methods and tools are not adequate to evaluate the effect of conflict among tower cranes in terms of time and cost calculations. Moreover, they don’t assure the maximum efficiency of tower crane layout to fulfill the needs of crane-based executed activities. This research develops an Agent Based Simulation (ABS) model to overcome the limitations of previous research. It calculates the time and the cost of tower cranes operation cycles, taking into account the potential conflict among the working tower cranes. A case study is provided to demonstrate the capabilities and contributions of the developed ABS model. 1 INTRODUCTION There is a need to incorporate Agent-Based (AB) technologies with significant construction operations such as tower crane operations. Most previous work is based solely on mathematical or discrete event simulation technique. Previous models often lack dealing with conflict effect between tower crane, which is the key of time and cost calculation. In addition, they didn’t focus on the ability of tower cranes layout to comply with the time schedule. The main objective of this research is to develop an ABS model to solve the multi tower crane location problems and to overcome the limitations of the previous research work. To achieve this main objective, the following sub-objectives are carried out: 1. Study tower crane operations to describe the interaction between tower cranes and other tower crane layout objects; supply points, demand points and site requests. Also, study conflicts between tower cranes and how to solve the conflicts. 2. Build calculations which represent tower crane movements, conflict between cranes and cost calculations. 3. Develop an agent based simulation model based on external MS Excell database for input data entry to show the real time of tower crane operations. The model should be able to capture the dependencies and interactions of the model elements; tower cranes, supply points, demand points and site requests. Also, the model is designed to collect data from tower cranes to estimate the time and cost of tower crane operations. 4. Design user interface to facilitate exploring the expected time/cost for different scenarios to help decision maker to choose the appropriate combination of tower crane.