Estimation of the speed of soil excavation by fuzzy inference system

In different projects the speed of different machinery can be estimated using manufacturerʹs handbooks and a number of modification factors to consider the environmental effects, type of the project and status of site management. Since the statuses of different factors of the domestic projects are totally different from those of the international projects, there is a wide discrepancy between the determined speed by handbooks and the actual values in the domestic projects. This paper is aimed to develop a fuzzy system to estimate soil excavation rates at earthmoving jobsites. The proposed fuzzy system is based on IF-THEN rules; a genetic algorithm improves the overall accuracy. The obtained results clearly revealed the capability and applicability of the proposed system to properly estimate soil excavation speed. The average error of fuzzy system, handbook method and nearest neighbor interpolation are 10 , 92 and 32 percent, respectively.