Study of the Concrete Production Process -A graph theoretic approach

Abstract

The selection of concrete is a challenging task for civil engineers. The choice of concrete is normally arrived upon according to the correlation of the main factors and its co parameters. The civil engineers have to be rationalised in choosing the appropriate concrete for construction with the particular material for the application in order to produce low cost concrete. In this paper, graph-theoretic approach is used to find the best concrete process among the available different processes. The fishbone diagram represents the factors and its cofactors that are involved in the production process of concrete. A digraph characteristic is drawn which represents the factors like fibers, materials, method of curing and Admixture with their cofactors affecting the selection process. Identifying the interdependency of the factors and their inheritances and representing them by using numerical values with a matrix form are carried out in this work for three different processes of production of concrete. Plain Cement Concrete (PCC), Self Compacting Concrete (SCC) and High Strength Concrete (HSC) are considered in order to achieve the quality, strength and cost. This technique is illustrated with an example for decision-making problems when there are multiple alternatives to multiple interdependent factors.