Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

Cranes are becoming increasingly complex, able to lift heavier loads, and thus are becoming larger and heavier. Lift engineers are required to make complex decisions whether to develop customized equipment or to design units that can be utilized multiple times and thereby ensure a sufficient return on investment. Although some equipment can be designed quickly and custom-made, most must be engineered thoroughly, which requires longer design time and proper code testing. Enterprises that invest in upfront rigging equipment engineering for heavy industrial projects such as oil sands developments achieve a competitive edge in project bidding, but optimized rigging selection is only effective if the engineer has alternative rigging options for crane operation and can quickly evaluate several possibly solutions. This requires an effort to organize, categorize, and continually update the existing rigging component database. In this context, a state-of-the-art rigging management approach is proposed. NCSG Crane & Heavy Haul Corporation owns a large fleet of cranes that are either used for internal heavy construction projects or rented to other builders. To expand the partner's range of services, the research team will build a generic and automated system for selecting the most appropriate crane based on capacity, site layout geometry, and appropriate rigging for the project at hand; will develop a versatile algorithm for locating mobile cranes; and will validate the output of theoretical analyses using visualization and animations. The developed approach for selecting, locating and operating mobile cranes eliminates equipment guesswork and will result in significant savings by improving the utilization of onsite equipment, thereby increasing the competitiveness and profitability of Canadian oil sands development operations. This research will also improve the safety of mobile cranes operations, which at present is a significant contributor to injury and lost productivity on construction sites. Finally, improving the efficiency of crane operations while reducing the likelihood of work stoppages due to poor operational planning, guesswork, or suspended equipment failure will also serve to reduce the emissions from onsite work.*